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The Optimist. 



BY 

CHARLES FREDERIC GOSS. 





THE 



CINXIXNATI : 
ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY. 
1897. 



Copyright, 1897, 
By The Robert Clarke Company. 



PREFACE. 



These brief essays were originally written 
for the columns of the Cincinnati Commercial 
Tribune. 

They were prompted by the belief that the 
readers of daily papers can be interested in 
ethics as well as in politics — in the spiritual as 
well as the material phases of our existence. 

These are, after all, the elements which pos- 
sess an eternal fascination, and they are to be 
found in every incident of daily life, no matter 
how trivial. 

What we lack is the power to discover them 
for ourselves, and we need the help of inter- 
preters. 

A corps of reporters trained to see and re- 
veal these subtle but beautiful qualities, would 
build up the greatest newspaper in the world. 



iv PRE FA CE. 

It was at the urgent solicitation of many 
friendly readers, who desired to place these 
secular sermons upon the shelves of their li- 
brary, that the author consented to their re-ap- 
pearance in permanent form. 

C. F. G. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



I. What is an optimist ? i 

II. The servant girl 5 

III. The dilapidated coach 9 

IV. How the old man has changed ! 14 

V. The game of marbles iS 

VI. Old Uncle Ben 22 

VII. The end of his rope 25 

VIII. Mister, whip behind!.. 29 

IX. The waste basket 32 

X. Turn on the lights 36 

XI. Jolly him up 39 

XII. I appreciate you, Dobbin 42 

XIII. Sand ! 46 

XIV. The two old street cars 50 

XV. I'm in the swim 54 

XVI. Coasting ! 5 S 

XVII. The flowers and the frost 62 

XVIII. Mr. and Mrs. Recently Married 65 

XIX. Burn your own smoke 69 

XX. Would be, if I was at work 73 

XXI. The scissors grinder 77 

XXII. The treadmill of life So 

XXIII. Young Blunderbuss 84 



(v) 



vi CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XXIV. Little Bill's first day . . 87 

XXV. The dandelion 90 

XXVI. The robin 94 

XXVII. The scorcher 97 

XXVIII. The honey bee 101 

XXIX. "It's a boy!" 105 

XXX. The foul tip 108 

XXXI. I 've got a cinch 112 

XXXII. Keep sweet 116 

XXXIII. Others shall sing the song 119 

XXXIV. The pin prick 122 

XXXV. Over the line 126 

XXXVI. The optimist's corner 129 

XXXVII. Eve-opener and night-cap 132 

XXXVIII. Reminds me of a story 135 

XXXIX. Mumble the peg 140 

XL. Run-backs 143 

XLI. Business is business 146 

XLII. No gain except by loss. 150 

XLIII. Let me out at Shillito 154 

XLIV. The parrot. 157 

XLV. The elderberry palace 161 

XLVI. The sacrifice hit 165 

XLVII. The snake and the toad 168 

XLVIII. He lost his grip ... 172 

XLIX. There are others 175 

L. Here's a hoop to your barrel 178 

LI. Standing in your own light 182 



CONTENTS. vii 

PAGE 

LII. Thanksgiving day 186 

LIII. The young aeronaut 190 

LIV. The hot copper 194 

LV. Get a move on you 19S 

LVL Christmas 202 

LVII. Tell a story, sing, or dance 206 

LVIII. Bunch your hits 210 

LIX. Tighten your belt 213 

LX. All need and all help 219 

LXI. You Ve got a puncture 220 

LXII. The cindei path 223 

LXIII. Mr. Phil. O. Sopher 226 

LXIV. Our debt to the birds 230 

LXV. Drawing the line 234 

LXVI. Choose 238 

LXYII. Straining at gnats 242 

LXVIII. The compromise 246 



THE OPTIMIST. 



I. 

upRANDMA, what" ith a pethimitht ?" 

asked little Jim, climbing into the old 
— . lady's lap and putting a dim- 



pled hand on either cheek. 




(i) 



2 



THE OPTIMIST. 



when he is miserable, and a pessimist is a man 
who is miserable when he is happy," said 
grandma. 

The old lady knew that, after all, there is 
not so much difference in the lots of men. 

If there were an instrument delicate enough 
to measure the disappointments, losses and un- 
realized hopes in the lives of Sir John Lubbock 
and Schopenhauer, it would show a pretty even 
balance. Why, then, did life seem to the for- 
mer a blessing and to the latter a curse ? 

Why does the same sun melt butter and 
harden clay ? Why is the same food meat to 
one stomach and poison to another? Why is 
the same water death to the dove and life to 
the duck? 

Answer these last questions and you can an- 
swer the first. If a man is noble and brave 
and trustful, he will be happy, even when he 
is miserable. If he is base and cowardly and 
suspicious, he will be miserable when he is 
happy. 

Pessimism is always, in its final analysis, 
nothing more nor less than pusillanimity. It is 
the unwillingness or inability to stand up and 
make a manful fight against the doubts and de- 
spairs that hover around our immortal spirits 
in this life of mystery and sorrow. The final 
and consummate misery of pessimism originates 
in the delicious pleasures of melancholy. Name 



THE OPTIMIST. 



3 



me a state of mind more full of seductive and 
exquisite happiness than to be thoroughly mis- 
erable, to feel that you have no friends, that 
there is nothing worth living for. that there is 
no use in effort ! The secret of that pleasure 
lies in the luxury of repose, of abandonment, 
of relaxation. In those soft hours we do not 
strive, we do not resist, we do not fight. He 
who thinks that every thing is bad and getting 
worse, is glad to see it so, whether he knows it 
or not. because it gives him an excuse for not 
being a victor through strife. 

And through all his tragic experience, the 
failure and misery is simply in his own bosom, 
and not in the universe. Life satisfies and 
supports whoever has the inherent power to 
satisfy and support himself. All others it swal- 
lows into its bottomless depths as the sea buoys 
up the man who can swim and gulps down the 
man who can not. 

This nerveless, purposeless fellow, thrown 
out into the sea of life, flounders a moment 
and then goes down like a stone. In a mo- 
ment he reappears half strangled, flings out 
his hands, shrieks, and sinks again. Once 
more he rises, and. with one final gurgling 
curse upon the ravenous flood, vanishes for- 
ever. 

But not far away from him a strong swimmer 
breasts the billows joyously, turns over on his 



4 



THE OPTIMIST. 



side, then on his back, and even floats without 
an effort, or possibly goes to sleep while doing 
so. as Franklin said he did for hours while 
swimming in the English Channel. 

One gets tired of hearing the pessimist curse 
his life for being unsatisfactory, and would be 
glad to hear him curse himself for not knowing 
how to live it. It was a good enough world 
for Epictetus. the philosophic slave. Listen to 
him : 

" Do you ask." he said, " how is it possible 
that one can live prosperously who hath 
nothing — a naked, homeless, hearthless. bes:- 
garly man. without servants, without country? 
Lo, God hath sent you a man to show you in 
very deed that it is possible. Behold me, 
that I have neither country, nor house, nor 
possessions, nor servants. I sleep on the 
ground, nor is a wife mine, nor children, nor 
domicile ; but only earth and heaven and a 
single cloak. And what is lacking to me? 
Do I ever grieve ? Do I fear ? Am I not 
free ? When did any of you see me fail of my 
pursuit, or meet with what I had avoided ? 
When did I blame God or man ? " 



THE OPTIMIST. 



5 



II. 



OR six months or more the once joyous 



■*■ and hopeful Jimson had been steadily 
growing sour and melancholly. 

One morning his neighbors, who rode down 
with him in the street car, observed a slight 
change for the better. On the day following 
the improvement was still more perceptible, 
his eye being a little clearer and his step a lit- 
tle lighter. On the third day his face was 
wreathed in smiles, he slapped them on the 
shoulders in the old familiar way, and said, 
" Good morning," like a school boy. 

"What in the world has come over you?" 
they all inquired at once. 

"I '11 tell you, " he replied. ' ' For six months 
or more we have been changing servant girls 
almost as often as we have our linen. A long 
procession of them has filed in and out of our 
house, each one of them, according to her own 
particular genius, irritating some individual 
member of the household, or treading on all 
of our toes together. My wife has been wor- 
ried to death, the children have been cross, the 
food unfit to eat, and every thing has gone to 
the dogs. 




6 



THE OPTIMIST. 



"Three days ago a young woman stepped 
into the kitchen and took hold of that estab- 
lishment of ours, as a river pilot takes hold of 
a steamboat. The first meal that came on the 
table tasted like food used to at my old grand- 
mother's, when we little half-starved children 
sat down to the second table on Thanksgiving 
Day. She moved around the dining-room as 
quietly as a goldfish moves around in a glass 
globe. She spoke in a low. soft voice, and 
with the dim suggestion of a smile hidden 

DO 

somewhere and just ready to slip out upon her 
lips. She found no fault, said she was fond of 
children, and went about her work humming, 
almost inaudibly, little snatches from 1 Robin 
Adair/ 'Ben Bolt, 3 6 Flow Gently, Sweet 
Afton/ and a dozen old songs that carried us 
back to the days of Auld Lang Syne. 

•• My eldest girl, who was just back from 
Vassar, and was supposed to hate ' house- 
work,' went into the kitchen and offered, of 
her own accord, to wipe the dishes. Little 
Bill hung around her. and asked her on the 
sly ' if she could make cookies with caraway 
seed in them/ and my poor wife sat right down 
on the rug in the library and had a good old- 
fashioned cry, muttering incoherently that ' ev- 
ery cloud has a silver lining/ 'It's always 
darkest before the dawn/ * She wasn't worthy 



THE OPTIMIST. 



7 



of her mercies/ i and if she lived, she was go- 
ing to be a better wife and mother.' 

" I tell you, boys, there has been a trans- 
formation in that house ! And when I think 
what astounding results one single individual 
person can work in the comfort and, if I must 
say it, the morals of a family (for we were fast 
becoming heathens). I am dumfounded ! 

" There 's that little Irish girl— who never 
went to school a solid year in her whole life, 
and who has no knowledge and no culture 
besides that of a sense of duty and a feeling 
of love — yet she just comes down on that do- 
mestic machine, rubbing and jarring and 
squeaking with friction, like a drop of lubri- 
cating oil of the milk of human kindness" — 

" Mixed metaphor," whispered the literary 
editor. 

" Mixed or not." continued Jimson, good- 
humoredly, i: she has made us all over new." 

' 'And now I want to say that I don't put a 
sweet-tempered, loving-hearted, helping-handed 
servant girl second to any class of people in 
this world, for the benedictions they shed on 
human life — and I won't except soldiers dying 
on the fields of battle, martyrs going to the 
stake, nurses ministering to the sick, ministers 
preaching, editors writing leading articles nor 
anybody else !" 



8 



THE OPTIMIST. 



When they left the car each one of Jimson's 
three friends took him by the buttonhole, and 
whispered something into his ear. 

They all asked the same identical question : 
" Say, Jimson, has she got a sister?" 



THE OPTIMIST. 



9 



III. 



DILAPIDATED old coach, having met 



<*■ *• with an accident, had been sent to the 
carriage-maker's for repairs. 

It stood on the sidewalk in front of a shop 
on the Reading road. In the box was seated 
a bareheaded boy, stretching his hands out as 



if grasping a pair of lines. On the patched 
cushions inside were three little girls, holding 
their dollies in their arms, and gazing at them 
or out of the windows, in a sort of rapture. 

Although the wagon tongue lay idle on the 
ground, the little coachman could see four 
splendid horses galloping before him, and 
could feel the pull of the reins on his chubby 
palms. 





10 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Although the broken wheel was in the shop, 
and its tire lying red upon the anvil, it seemed 
to the little ladies that they were rolling over a 
magnificent boulevard in a primeval forest, 
and through a bewildering labyrinth of flow- 
ers, while birds sang from the trees and fount- 
ains plashed in marble basins. 

The jaded roues, the miserable victims of 
ennui, the surfeited pleasure-seekers who passed 
now and then, might well have stopped to learn 
the secret of human happiness. Could these 
little philosophers have spoken, they would 
have said : 

"Happiness in childhood springs out of a 
spontaneous, and in manhood out of an edu- 
cated, imagination. The world is what it 
seems, not what it is. Life is rather what the 
soul reads into it than what it stamps upon the 
soul. See us! Here is a battered old coach 
standing on a plank sidewalk, in front of a 
weather beaten old carriage shop, beside a 
dusty road. It is rickety, a wheel is off, there 
are no horses, and yet every thing seems new 
and beautiful to us. Surely such old people 
as you are, who know so much more than we 
little children, ought to be able to drape the 
rough and ragged edges of life with beauty, 
and permeate a world like this with something 
of the joy that reposes in the immortal spirit. " 

"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings 



THE OPTIMIST. 



11 



hast thou ordained strength." ''And a little 
child shall lead them." Let the great doctors 
in the temple listen to the voice of the heaven 
educated youth. 

What is this world ? What it seemed to 
Homer, or to Helvetius, or to Darwin ? What 
is life? What it seemed to Solomon, or Isaiah, 
or Paul, or Xero, or Dante, or Goethe, or John 
Wesley, or Schopenhauer ! Is it what the 
child thinks it. in the coach, or the youth upon 
the Commencement stage, or the old man upon 
the edge of the grave? The criminal thinks 
the world a jail, the merchant a shop, the priest 
a temple, the young mother a paradise, the 
widow a sepulcher. 

And this is all because the soul suffers itself 
to receive, as upon a sensitive plate, the im- 
pression of the passing panels of the revolving 
panorama. 

If it had the wisdom of the child, it would 
read its own self into those passing panels, and 
stamp the impress of its own immortal life upon 
them. 

There is not a man living who does not testify 
to the child's philosophy by every hour of his 
life. The pleasure which the gambler derives 
from his painted cards and faro checks — is it 
real or imaginary? Do they arouse it in him. 
or does he read it into them? 

When a young man drives his first team of 



12 



THE OPTIMIST. 



thoroughbreds, the joy he feels is no less the 
result of imagination than that possessed by 
the boys upon the box. To a soured old pes- 
simist, a light buggy and two lumps of horse- 
flesh seem as little real ground for happiness as 
an antiquated old coach in a carriage shop. 

And it is with our sorrow as with our joys. 
What makes the little coachman blubber now? 
It is because the old blacksmith has ordered 
him off the box. But in five minutes he will 
be just as happy making a mud pie in the gut- 
ter. What makes that man whom the sheriff 
has just ordered out of his office turn white 
and gasp for breath and clutch at his heart ? 
In a year from now he will have decorated 
another office with his dreams, and be as happy 
in his hopes. 

I say, with the children, that there is a power 
in the soul to make life what it chooses. 

Since I have been a grown up man, I have 
had as much pleasure out of a $15 Cayuse 
pony as Bonner ever had out of his $100,000 
horses. I can not own a Meissonier, nor a 
Bouguereau, nor a Millet; but I have two 
chromos of a black bass and a speckled trout, 
and I have waded in mountain streams while 
looking at them, as truly as the little coachman 
on the box drove through the forests of Won- 
derland, while gazing at his imaginary steeds. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



13 



Some men believe in the world. The little 
children believe in the soul. For one. I am 
trying to educate my imagination back to child- 
hood. Little children are the only ones who 
really enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 



14 



THE OPTIMIST. 



IV. 



RURAL visitor in an art gallery was as- 



tonished and delighted by a painting of 
the majestic figure of Moses, the lawgiver. 
Having discovered the author, he gave him an 
order for a life-size portrait of his own father, 
who had been a long time dead. 

" Have you a photograph of him ? " inquired 
the painter. 

" No ; he never had one taken." 
"Well, how do you expect me to paint a 
picture of a man I have never seen?" 

"Did you ever see Moses?" inquired the 
surprised countryman. 

The artist perceived the point, executed the 
commission, and summoned his patron to its 
inspection. 

He looked at it a long time with rapt atten- 
tion, and then exclaimed with a sigh, " Lord ! 
how the old man has changed! " 

Surely, this is going as far in adoration of 
art as the wildest and most exacting of the 
Modern Esthetes could demand. When a 
man is willing to abandon all the preconceived 
opinions of a lifetime, and renounce the im- 
pression made upon his mind's eye by the 




THE OPTIMIST. 



15 



daily vision of his father, because an artist 
tells him to, the motto, "Art for art's sake," 
has been carried to its utmost point of reali- 
zation. 

Absurd and impossible as the story seems, 
it is scarcely an exaggeration of the folly 
of multitudes of worshipers at the shrine of 
modern art, which demands of her votaries 
as their first offering, the sacrifice of every pre- 
conceived opinion on the subject of the beau- 
tiful. 

The composer presents us with a wild rigma- 
role of concatenated sounds, and when Ave 
protest that this is neither what we have heard 
k, in the heavens above, nor in the earth be- 
neath, nor in the water under the earth." he 
greets us with a smile of profound commisera- 
tion, and tells us that he has heard it in his 
own soul! There is nothing for us to do but 
to cry out with the credulous countryman, 
" Lord! how the old man has changed ! " 

The artist hangs before our astonished eyes 
a canvas containing a landscape with which we 
have been familiar all our lives. The hills, 
the lake, the forest are there in outlines vague 
and dim. but on them play lights which " never 
were on the sea nor land." and they are so al- 
tered by the freedom of his composition that 
we rub our eyes and think an earthquake must 
have altered the very face of nature. It is in 



16 



THE OPTIMIST. 



vain that we remonstrate. The hero of the 
brush belongs to the impressionist school. 
What he has put upon the canvas he has seen, 
and it is only a proof of our stupidity if we 
have not. What can we do but moan, " Lord! 
how the old man has changed ! " 

The novelist sends us a volume purporting 
to be a study of the old familiar scenes and 
characters of daily life. The people are as 
strange as the citizens of the other planet. 
They are animated by motives which are in- 
adequate to their deeds. They mingle with 
each other on a plane of existence scarcely 
above the level of the brutes. The lower mo- 
tives predominate, and passion is the theme to 
which the whole story is keyed. If we pro- 
test that we, too, have "seen the world," and 
that whatever else this drama is, it is not a 
representation of society as we have beheld it, 
the smile of compassion deepens into one of 
derision, and we are told that this is "real 
life," and that the novelist's business is to give 
us life as it is. And so we must bow to these 
High Priests of Art and solace ourselves with 
the exclamation of the astounded countryman, 

Lord! how the old man has changed! " 

Some of us are getting restive under this 
tyranny. We are willing to see in nature 
what some one else beholds, but we do not 



THE OPTIMIST. 



17 



care to be told that our own eyes are made of 
glass. 

We are willing that "the old man" should 
undergo any natural evolution, but we refuse 
to have the artist put an entirely new head 
upon him and compel us still to call him 
father. 



IS 



THE OPTIMIST. 



V. 

'T'HE ancient Egyptians attributed the com- 
ing of the spring to the rising of the Nile. 
In America there are three powers instead 
of one that bring the vernal season to the 
earth, the robin, the small boy with his marbles, 
and the crocus. 

The robin has done his part, the crocus is 

yet to come, 
but the small 
boy with his 
marbles, is 
now putting his 
shoulder to the 
wheels and 
pushing on the 
revolving year. 
You may see 
him on every 
corner, kneeling on the ground and sticking 
his marbles into that cabalistic circle which 
he has drawn in the dirt. 

I hope I may be forgiven for envying him. 
All that we old fellows can do is to envy and 
remember. Our knees and thumb joints are 
too stiff for imitation. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



19 



It seems a long time ago that we ransacked 
our bureau drawers for the mislaid marbles, 
stuffed our pockets with them until they pro- 
jected like the cheeks of a Satyr, and went 
forth to the practice of that immortal pastime. 
The boys who grow up in this region of mon- 
grel winters, can not fully realize the strange 
wild flow of the sap of life in those more 
northerly latitudes, where the first warm day 
comes with a sudden surprise, melting the 
snow and laying bare the sidewalks. Then 
and there the whole boy nature opens and ex- 
pands. There is an instantaneous rush of the 
currents of life, like that of the snow water in 
the street. 

On such a day. in a little New York village, 
I used to open the door of the chicken-house 
and thrill with a sort of ecstacy as the barn- 
yard fowls flew cackling and crowing over the 
intervening snow banks to the open spaces that 
steamed in the sun. Then the old cow 
marched out to the south side of the barn to 
chew her cud and blink in the warm rays, and 
the robins sang in the top of the old maple out 
of whose sides the sap was running into my 
little tin pail ; and the old grandfather crept 
out from the shelter of the fireside to bathe his 
stiffening limbs in the balmy air. 

But the greatest sight of all was the knots of 
boys who had brought the spring, playing mar- 



20 



THE OPTIMIST. 



bles on every fine spot on the sidewalk round 
the village square. 

The boys are the real spring-bringers. 

Many vernal seasons will they bring to earth, 
these little fellows over whom we stumble as 
we rush for the electric cars. In a few more 
years they will lay aside their marbles, snatch 
their paint brushes or their pens, their printing 
presses or their muskets, and. like the lads 
who ushered in the age of Pericles, or of the 
Renaissance, bring a new spring upon the 
heels of our winter of trial and doubt and 
despair. 

On one of the battle-fields of the civil war, 
an old farmer showed me three marbles which 
he found in the pocket of a dead drummer 
boy. 

Multitudes of these heroes who stopped 
those flying bullets, who won those terrible 
battles, and served their glorious nation, were 
none too old to play a game of marbles. 

Step over those groups of marble players re- 
spectfully. Go round them deferentially, for 
in fifteen years or so they will be laying us old 
fellows quietly on the shelf, and stepping into 
the shoes out of which we slowly drag our un- 
willing feet. 

So we treated our fathers, and so will we be 
treated by our children. 

The new bud pushes off the old leaf. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



21 



The boy with his marbles presses into the 
counting-room, and forces the man with his 
account book into the vacant arm-chair in the 
corner. 

But the world is the better for his coming. 
He brings the spring. 



22 



THE OPTIMIST. 



VI. 



N old playmate of his told me that when 



" Uncle Ben" was a boy, his regular 
rations at school were two thrashings per diem. 

To his own uncles he was an object of ter- 
ror. They always examined all the chairs to 
see if he had " accidentally " left any bent pins 
on them. 

But when little nephews and nieces began 
to call him " Uncle." every thing was changed, 
and the sap in his royal nature began to flow. 
They came to him, the little toddling things, 
as children go with their pails to the great 
maple trees which line the streets of New En- 
gland villages. 

At sight of him they crept away from their 
nurses, deserted their hobby horses, abandoned 
their marbles, and climbed upon him until he 
looked like a pyramid covered with roses. 

""I'll tell my Uncle Ben," was the threat 
with which the little nephews terrified the 
"bullies" of the schoolyard. 

" Uncle Ben would give me some," was the 
argument with which the little nieces extorted 
candy from their fathers in the village store. 

"Uncle Ben, there was a big frost last 




THE OPTIMIST. 



23 



night; won't you take us nutting?" "Uncle 
Ben, the trout are biting over in the Chickapee 
river; will you go next Saturday?" "Uncle 
Ben, there 's a Punch-and-Judy show down 
town to-day, and mamma won't let us go alone. 
You'll take us, won't you, Uncle Ben? We 
knew you would, dear Uncle Ben." 

All that was thirty years or more ago, and 
now dear old Uncle Ben is sick. He has had 
a long, hard pull. For a year or more he has 
been on his little cot in the front chamber, old 
and deaf and helpless, with his long, white 
beard and his kindly eyes and his sunny 
smiles. Don't you worry about Uncle Ben. 
Love watches over him. All he has to do is 
to touch a little electric button at any hour of 
the day or night, and the whole family will 
turn out like a fire department. 

On the wall o\ er his bed he keeps the pho- 
tograph of a very old and wrinkled woman. 
It is his mother — old Uncle Ben's mother; 
dead for half a century. 

Uncle Ben has never forgotten his friends, 
and his friends have never forgotten him. 
Those nieces and nephews are fathers and 
mothers now, with troops of little children at 
their heels, and a little "Ben'' in every fam- 
ily. And every Sunday, from all parts of the 
city,- they come like pilgrims to the sacred 



24 



THE OPTIMIST. 



shrine, where old Uncle Ben lies calmly wait- 
ing for his summons. 

They lay their flowers down upon his bed, 
stroke his silver hair, lift up the little grand- 
nieces and grandnephews for a touch of his 
trembling hand, and have to be fairly driven 
out of the room by the nurse. 

Some day, ere long, but not until the cro- 
cuses have bloomed, I hope, for he loved them 
so, four stalwart nephews will take the casket 
in their hands and reverently bear that noble 
form to its last resting-place. 

And if they could, the true-hearted fellows 
would, I think, precede the spirit of the dear 
old man to the gate of the beautiful city and 
say to the aged porter: "If you are looking 
for some one to add the last drop of happiness 
to the cups of the little children who are play- 
ing in the golden streets, just open the gate for 
our old Uncle Ben." 



THE OPTIMIST. 



25 



VII. 



r | "HE tropes and metaphors of the common 
* people may be too vulgar for printed 
poems, but they are filled with those deep 
imaginations out of which all truest poetry is 
born. 

" He has got to the end of his rope." 

Ah, but that common and despised phrase 
is full of pictures ! It is true that the pictures 
have slipped out of the frame of the words, 
but they are easily recovered. I see them 
now — a furious dog rushing the length of his 
chain and 
strangling his 
neck with his 
collar — a calf - 
with his face to 
the stake to 




which he is 
tied, four feet 
dug into the 
sod, head low 
d o w n, and 
bulging eyes rolled heavenward — an old horse 
standing in a circle of grass gnawed to the roots, 
and vainly trying to stretch a hemp rope, to 



26 



THE OPTIMIST. 



reach a tuft of clover with his flapping upper 
lip! 

They have gotten to the ends of their ropes, 
poor things. It was such scenes as these that 
suggested to some forgotten poet of the com- 
mon people the metaphor which I have chosen 
for our morning text. 

We are each of us tied with a rope, and 
most of us, most of the time, are at its end. 
Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is sad, 
and sometimes it is terrible. 

Mrs. Higherup has been for ten years 
making the most comical efforts to get into the 
charmed circle of the four hundred, but she is 
tied by the rope of her bad grammar and her 
bad manners to the stake of a vulgar past. 
She has climbed to the last possible step she 
can take, she has come to the end of her 
rope. 

Poor Jo Sandbagger (better known as No. 
649) has been trying ever since he left jail to 
be a worthy man and find a place to earn an 
honest living, but, somehow or other, just as 
the prize is within his reach the rope tightens. 
God help him ! for it seems as if man will not. 

Young Highflyer never knew that he was 
tied at all. His parents gave him altogether 
too much rope. But the other day he found 
one end of it around his neck and the other 
around a gallows. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



27 



Yes. there are mortal limitations on us all. 
We can range a little way, and then the rope 
tightens and we hear the mysterious and un- 
welcome voice, •* Thus far shalt thou go. and 
no farther.'' 

Some of us are struggling after a senatorial 
chair, but our rope only reaches to an alder- 
man's footstool ! It is our inability to grasp 
political combinations that holds us back. 
Some of us are trying to accumulate a fortune, 
but a too great love or a too great fear of 
speculation prevents us and makes it uncertain 
whether we shall even attain a competence. 
Some of us are trying to make the world 
better by inaugurating new reforms or uphold- 
ing ancient institutions, but physical weakness, 
or mental poverty, hampers our progress. 

The world is full of patient toilers and eager 
stragglers, who admit with a sigh ar lament 
with a groan that they have gotten to the end 
of their ropes. Their resources are exhausted. 
They are doing as much — they have gone as 
far — as they can. 

"Well, what would you be? Gods? To 
be finite is to be limited — to be tied with a 
rope ! And no matter how long a man's rope 
is, it has an end. Moses got to the end of his 
rope when his heart broke in the mountains of 
Xebo. Shakespeare got to the end of his rope 
when he produced " Hamlet." 



23 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Our rcpes are a little shorter than theirs, but 
I fancy they suffered as much when they got 
to the end of them. Let us all work up to our 
limits. Let us strain our cords and bands to 
the utmost tension. 

The more we feel them hold us back, the 
gladder we shall be when the third one of 
the Weird Sisters cuts the thread and lets 
us go. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



29 



VIII. 

CCHOOL was out. 

^ The Reading road was full of children, 
laugning and shouting ; little girls with their 
arms around each other's necks; little boys 
with their hands in each other's hair ; hundreds 
of them, thousands of them, millions of them — 
or. at least, it seemed so, as they darted here 
and there like a school of minnows in a pond. 

An enormous furniture van was moving up 
the street, the big Percheron horses pounding 
the pavement with their enormous feet, and 
the driver, bare-armed and burly, holding the 
reins and a long whip in his hand. 

Suddenly a cry arose, "Whip behind! whip 
behind! Mister, whip behind!" 

I followed the direction in which full twenty 
score of chubby fingers pointed, and saw, 
snugly ensconced in the open spaces between 
the chairs and tables at the rear of the load, 
three little grinning urchins. 

The driver stood up and looked over the 
top of the load, but could see nothing. He 
leaned around the side of the wagon and 
gazed. It was in vain. 

His resources, however, were not exhausted. 



30 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Unfurling his long lash, he swung it out into 
the air and curled it behind him with an almost 
divine skill, exploding the snapper close to the 
ears of the little steal-a-riders, who mocked 
him villainously. 

Afterward he sat down, observing as I did, 
no doubt, that the wagon stood the extra load 
well, and that the great Percherons did not 
feel the weight. 

But the cry resounded again in the street, 
' ' Whip behind ! Whip behind, mister, w T hip 
behind!" 

" Fine example of public spirit,'' I said to 
myself. But as I listened and looked again 
and again, I seemed to detect a tone of envy 
in the cry. 

"Ah," I reflected, "is it possible that. these 
illustrious young citizens wish themselves in 
the places of the steal-a-riders, after all, and 
would they take them if they could, and are 
they only too lazy or too infirm to steal a ride 
themselves ?" 

Forthwith there rose before my view the 
great van of the Government, and Uncle Sam, 
the driver, and I heard the cries of patriotic citi- 
zens by the roadside, ' ' Whip behind ! Whip be- 
hind, mister, whip behind! The monopolists 
are stealing a ride I" 

I looked, and saw a few steal-a-riders, tucked 



THE OPTIMIST. 



31 



away in soft berths, out of the reach of your 
uncle's whip. 

" Down with the privileged classes," cried 
the wayfarer on the highway. '' Put them off. 
Cut behind !" 

"Is it unselfish patriotism." said I to myself, 
' • or is it some laziness and envy ?" Would they, 
too, like a ride behind? I wonder why they 
do not take it. There seems a world of room. 
The van is large, the horses strong, the driver 
kind. 

Why not jump aboard, instead of pulling 
down the men who catch the rides? 

When I was a barefooted schoolboy, we used 
to sing a song, two lines of which I have never 
forgotten : 

"Come along, come along, don't be a fool; 
For Uncle Sam is rich enough to send us all to 
school. " 

I believe that ! I believe in our natural re- 
sources, our republican institutions, and the 
integrity of the people. I believe in the big 
van, the big horses, and the kind driver. I 
think that what we need is not to prevent a 
few bright fellows from riding, but to jump 
aboard ourselves and pull up the weak and the 
poor and the unfortunate. 

The great van of prosperity is coming down 
the road. I hear the rumble of the wheels. 
Get aboard ! 



32 



THE OPTIMIST. 



IX. 



"I 

waste basket a 



FEAR that the work of the twentieth 
century will consist in taking out of the 
multitude of excellent ideas, 
which the 
ninet eenth 
century has 
heedlessly 
thrown into 
it." 

If these 
words had 
been uttered 
by some tim- 
id, backward- 
looking theo- 
logian, they 
would have no 
more import 
than their 
pleasant pict- 
uresqueness gives them. 

But they were spoken by Ernest Renan, not 
long before his death ! 

They must have cost him a qualm, for he 
was busier than any other man, through his 




THE OPTIMIST. 



33 



long and ardent life, filling the waste basket 
higher and higher with those same " excellent 
ideas," which the next generation must fish out 
of its capacious jaws. 

How joyously did he and his confreres heap 
it up with those " childish superstitions," of 
"miracles," and "divine lives," and "in- 
spired books," and "revelations," and "resur- 
rections," and "ascensions." We can still 
hear the echoes of their voices as they pur- 
sued their work of demolition and destructive 
criticism, crying, "Take this rubbish away!" 
Those were great days in the early lives of 
Strauss and Renan, of Huxley and Tyndall, 
when they entered the libraries and laborato- 
ries of the ages, and, half blinded with dust, 
gathered up those crass theories of uncivilized 
barbarians and flung them, heap on heap, into 
the great catch-all. 

And now the reaction has set in, as it always 
does after every iconoclastic outburst, when 
men sit down to count the cost of their horse 
play, and see how the temple of civilization 
looks when its statues have been torn from 
their niches. 

Our grandfathers and grandmothers carried 
their spinning wheels, tall clocks, knickerbock- 
ers, and variegated silks up into the garret. 
We climb the creaking stairs, brush off the 
dust, rescue those faded treasures from obliv- 



THE OPTIMIST. 



ion, and either restore them to utility, or use 
them for ornaments. Such is the vibration of 
the pendulum of fashion, such the rhythmic 
movement of human life. And so the waste 
basket is not only a tomb of burial, but of res- 
urrection, and out of it, ideas and institutions 
have come forth on the third day or in the 
third generation, to a new and larger life. 

The materials that are cast into the rag bag 
are drawn forth and carried to the paper mill, 
from which they reappear purified and trans- 
formed. 

Did you think that every thing in the waste 
basket was gone for good and all ? It was in 
a waste basket in the Sinaitic monastery that 
Titiandorf found that precious manuscript of 
the New Testament. How many times the 
idealism of Plato has been thrown into the 
waste basket, only to be fished out again like 
a recovered pearl of greatest price. 

Men have been throwing the great doctrines 
of the Christian Church into the waste basket 
for centuries, and their children, groping in the 
rubbish, drag them out into the light with songs 
of triumph. 

This work of rescue, predicted by Renan, 
has already begun, and the twentieth century 
has not yet dawned. 

Patient historical criticism and a profounder 
and better philosophy are setting the old truths 



THE OPTIMIST. 



35 



in a new light. They are removing the false 
and deceptive characters which overlie the 
sublime originals on these ancient palimpsests. 

Multitudes of men who have laughed scorn- 
fully, as the destructive critics cast aside the 
sacred beliefs in our immortality, our God con- 
sciousness, and the divine incarnation, are al- 
ready groping in agony after the despised 
faiths, for they are learning that life is unen- 
durable without them. 

"I fear," said Renan (but I rejoice), "that 
the work of the twentieth century will consist 
in taking out of the waste basket a multitude 
of excellent ideas (truly excellent ideas), which 
the nineteenth has heedlessly (very heedlessly) 
thrown into it." 



36 



THE OPTIMIST. 



X. 




URN on the lights ! 

This is the motto of modern Christianity. 



Its adherents are no longer afraid of the 
most searching investigations. 

There is something startling about a blind- 
ing gleam of light shot into an obscurity where 
we are performing a task, no matter how pure 
and good it may be. I have seen a group of 
people jump from a hotel porch when the 
searchlight of a passing vessel was thrown upon 
them, as if they had been stealing. 

When that great searchlight, "modern 
criticism, " first fell upon the defenders of 
Christianity, it gave them a stupendous shock. 
In its brilliant rays we all saw much that we 
had never seen before, and, turning like startled 
and foolish children, we blamed and feared the 
light. 

But now there is no true Christian scholar 
who has not outgrown the idea that there is 
any thing in Christianity too sacred or too weak 
to bear criticism. 

As for the Bible, it is either a true revelation 
of the nature of man and of God, or it is not. 
If it is, it will stand all the light that can be 



THE OPTIMIST. 



37 



thrown upon it. If it is not, the sooner we 
know its real nature the better. This is the 
cool and impurturbable conclusion of every 
sane mind. 

The Bible is the crystallized wisdom of the 
most highly spiritualized men of the human 
family, and, like a great diamond, receives, 
purifies, intensifies, and casts back all the light 
thrown upon it. 

Scientific and historical criticism have done 
their worst, and are now doing their best, for 
this sacred volume. 

Multitudes of the noblest and strongest 
minds of the world have accepted every 
demonstrated conclusion of modern scholar- 
ship, and are still leaning hard upon this vener- 
able book for comfort and wisdom in the 
struggle of life, although the '"'constructive 
work " of the reverent students has not yet 
been completed. Thus has this wonderful 
volume emerged from another, its hardest, and 
I believe, its last, onslaught. 

Hitherto it had been attacked by its enemies ; 
but this time, by its friends. It crushed the 
one, and it has triumphantly enslaved the 
other, riveting upon them anew its bonds of 
beauty and of power. 

"Let mental culture go on advancing, let 
the natural sciences go on increasing in depth 
and breath, and the human mind expand as it 



38 



THE OPTIMIST. 



may, it will never go beyond the elevation and 
moral culture of Christianity as it shines forth 
in the Gospels," said Goethe. 

"Though I am a Helene at heart, the book 
has not only well entertained me, but also 
edified me. It is the book of books," said 
Heine. 

In these and similar words have the great 
men of all ages paid their tribute to the " Word 
of God." The man who wishes to nullify its 
power by means of modern scholarship must 
not forget that at last he must do so in spite of 
modern scholarship. 

Most of its opponents are not firing at its 
living defenders, but at ghosts who haunt its 
cemeteries. It is a senseless cannonade. 
Ghosts can neither right nor be hit. The lights 
have been all turned on, and still the sun out- 
shines them. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



39 



XL 

ii \ \ THERE are you going with that great 
* * basket? " I said to my friend Will 
Sunshine. 

"Oh, " he answered, "I am just going 
down to ' jolly up ' our old janitor, who broke 
his arm last week." 

Shall I tell you how 
to spend to-day ? 

Just take it for 
granted that every 
man you meet is car- 
rying a heart full 
of care and do your 
best to "jolly him 
up " a little. 

Of course it will 
cost you a struggle. 
You have your own 
worries. You need to be "jollied up " your- 
self, if anybody does. With a sick wife at 
home, a note coming due to-morrow with 
not a dollar in bank, last month's rent still 
unpaid, your little Jim going to school with a 
hole in his pants and your own coat getting 




40 



THE OPTIMIST. 



threadbare and shiny, you need to be "jollied 
up" yourself. 

If any one in the world has an excuse for put- 
ting his hat over his eyes, and turning his back 
when he sees poor Jenkins coming along with 
his woe-begone face, or Dobson with his tale 
of the wrong that was done him when a 
younger man was put in his place and his 
salary cut down — you are the man ! 

But no matter. This is an off day, and you 
are to try an experiment. You are going to 
think about other people's troubles and not 
your own. 

-Dobson and Jenkins need to be "jollied 
up," and you are the man to do it. Crowd 
your own worries back into your heart. 
Straighten out that wrinkled forehead. Get 
that old smile back upon your lips once more. 
Out with your strong right hand and give them 
a grip, the memory of which they will carry 
until they go to bed, and dream of it in their 
sleep. Poor fellows, they are having a hard 
time, both of them going down hill ! You 
may not think it, but a real bracing word and 
a friendly smile from you will make the whole 
world look different to them. 

And now be careful ! That old worried look 
is coming back upon you, your thoughts are 
turning in upon yourself , again, and it is not 
yet 10 o'clock. Why, man, you will meet 



THE OPTIMIST. 



41 



twenty other people before supper time that 
need to be '"jollied up" almost as much as 
they ! To-morrow, if you want to sag back 
into the old brooding, bothering, worrying life. 
I have nothing to say. But to-day you are not 
to let a single person come near you without 
catching some uplifting inspiration from you. 

Of course they will go home and say to their 
families : "I met an old friend of mine to-day, 
and he is one of those lucky dogs that never 
had a trouble in his life." 

But what if they do ? It 's better than to 
have them tell their wives that they met you 
and had a chill after you parted. What differ- 
ence does it make to you if people do think 
you never knew what trouble meant ? 

You do know that you are bearing it like a 
man, and may God bless you for it. Keep it 
to yourself. Do not try to win sympathy by 
displaying it. You will not get it if you do. 
People do not want a melancholy, whining 
fellow around. 

k ' Laugh, and the world laughs with you. 
Weep, and you weep alone." 

Remember, now. You are going to keep it 
up all day \ Every single person you meet is 
going to be happier for the meeting. Jolly 
them all up a little ! 



42 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XII. 

<< T WANT to see you a minute." said the 
* head of the firm. 

Dobbin was a timid, self-depreciating fel- 
low, and entered the private office with fear 
and trembling. 

" Dobbin." said the old man. " I have been 
watching you closely. You are an honest and 
faithful man. and I appreciate you. I have 
raised your wages. Here is your salary. Good 
night : God bless you. Dobbin. " 

When he reached home he rushed into the 
little suting-room. and cried. "Jane, the gov- 
ernor said he appreciated me. What do you 
think of that? He appreciated me!" 

••'What do I think of it?" said Jane. "I 
think it's about time. And. what's more, if 
he does appreciate you, why didn't he raise 
your wages ?'' 

"Oh!" exclaimed Dobbin, clapping his 
pocket, "he did. I forgot that. It was so 
pleasant to be appreciated!''' 

"You poor. dear, simple-hearted old thing, " 
said Jane, putting her arm around him, "take 
that, and that, and that." 

There is a threefold craving in the human 



THE OPTIMIST. 



43 



heart— for praise, for approbation, and for ap- 
preciation. 

Praise is always personal. We love it be- 
cause it flatters the ego. It is invariably dan- 
gerous, and generally hurtful. Approbation 
covers the action performed, the thing done. 
It implies a formal sanction of an effort or a se- 
ries of efforts, no matter from what motive 
performed. Appreciation is a subtle perception 
of our purpose, our desire — the motive, the 
deep, abiding disposition of a true and loving 
heart. 

It gives us the most real pleasure which we 
ever enjoy, for we instinctively love to be 
known as we are, when we try to be what we 
ought. 

Appreciation requires sympathy and love in 
the one who gives it. Even the exquisite 
beauty of a rose can only be appreciated by 
one who gazes at it with tenderness and affec- 
tion. "All true appreciation is the result of 
keen insight and noble passion," says Blackie 
in his great essay on self-culture. 

The desire for appreciation is one of the 
most elemental, and also one of the most un- 
derfed, appetites of the human soul. How 
many faithful, devoted, unselfish people there 
are in this world, who toil on and drudge on 
without the divine satisfaction of that yearning 
hunger ! 



44 



THE OPTIMIST. 



There are so many who know they do not 
deserve praise, and who have scarcely merited 
approbation. They are not highly endowed 
with great talents. They have tasks to per- 
form which are so far above them that probably 
they do not do them as well as they ought to 
be done. Perhaps they are physically unfit for 
them. Perhaps they have great burdens of 
sorrow upon their hearts which crush their 
energies. But they have been doing their 
best ! And they feel that any one who has 
done this has done all that any one ever does. 

If ever the moment comes when some one 
stops to look into such a heart with " the keen 
insight and noble passion " which detects the 
real motive and nature of such a suffering soul, 
and speaks but a single word of true apprecia- 
tion, that word comes like manna from heaven, 
like a cup of cold water to a traveler in a 
desert. 

Let us remember this noble hunger. Arid 
let us remember that floral tributes banked 
around a coffin will not satisfy it. It is the 
hunger of a living, throbbing heart, not the 
emptiness of a dead one. There is no nobler 
philanthropy than feeding that hunger. Per- 
haps you say with bitterness, "There is no one 
who needs it more and who receives so little 
as I myself." Well, it is more than likely. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



45 



But do not demand it. Do not ask for it. Do 
not even hint ! 

Appreciation and sympathy are two birds 
that were never overtaken by a hunter nor 
caught in a snare. When they come, they 
open the door of the cage and enter, all of 
their own accord. 



46 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XIII. 



HERE is an instinctive love of clean dirt 



A in the bosom of every noble man. 
Out of the dust we are made. In our lives 
we have eaten and assimilated a portion, per- 
haps, of every cosmic substance. We are of 
the earth earthy. 

To the dust we must return, and there are 
moments of weariness when it is sweet to think 
of being 

" Brother to the insensible rock 

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain 
Turns with his share and treads upon." 

A ' distinguished physician says that much 
of our metropolitan nervousness and lack of 
power is because we step altogether on car- 
pets and stone pavements, and do not draw 
up through our root-like feet the energizing ele- 
ments of the soil. 

Those of us who have followed the plow 
barefooted through the long furrow and felt 
the cooling, tranquilizing. rapture-stirring touch 
of the moist earth, as we dug our toes into the 
loose mold, are easy converts to that view. 
Who was ever so happy and so strong as when 




THE OPTIMIST. 



47 



he thus walked whistling behind the plow, 
watching the meadow moles and meadow larks? 

The country boy shapes wet clay into forms 
of living things, rejoices that he has already 
eaten his " peck of dirt,' 5 rolls in the soft 
sand by the marge of the lake before plunging 
into the flood, and loathes to wash his feet, 
covered with stone bruises and grime, in the 
cold water dipped up from the wellhouse 
spring, when starting off to bed. 




The city boy must get his sand in the pile 
before a new building, now and then. As 
bees find flowers, pigeons corn, and sparrows 
crumbs, the little gamins find sand piles and 
the smeared mortar mixer who swears at his 
mates winks at their petty larceny when they 
smuggle off the sacred stuff in their distended 
pockets. Little children need more sand, and 
so do those of larger growth. The greatest 
man is he of the most sand. 



48 



THE OPTIMIST. 



When the chicken's digestion wanes, he puts 
more sand in his crop. When the great drive- 
wheels on the locomotive of the " G Whizz" 
slip on the wet tracks of a steep grade, the fire- 
man puts more sand on the rails. What the 
average man needs is " more sand !" 

Will power, energy, purpose, are all called 
by the hard name " grit," and grit is sand. 

" Grit is the grain of character. It may be 
generally described as heroism materialized ; 
spirit and will thrust into heart, brain and 
backbone," said E. P. Whipple. 

The virtue of the Sheffield cutlery is due 
chiefly to the fine grit in the grindstones on 
which it is sharpened. Grit sharpens wit. 

The sine qua non of human life 

Is hard, siliceous grit. 
Without it, no one can win the fight 

Nor conquer a little bit ! 

If there ever was a time when men have 
needed " sand " more than in this year of grace 
1896, history has not recorded it. There are 
more men puffing up a steep grade on slippery 
rails to-day than we think. Not only are the 
wheels whirling without gripping the track, but 
the brakes themselves won't hold. The only 
thing that can keep them from slipping back- 
ward into the ditch is " sand." Do not spare 
it, men! Put the last grain of it on the rail, 
open the throttle and let her go ! It may be 



THE OPTIMIST. 



49 



that one final pull will bring you over the top 
of the hill. 

What a superb quality " sand " is ! Some- 
thing of it is seen in the bulldog, the game- 
cock and the racehorse. But as the light in 
the fungi and liverwort, the firefly and the 
glow-worm, is lifted into perfection in a star, 
so this quality of invincible purpose becomes 
climatic in man. 

Without it, manhood is mere human pulp. 
If softening of the brain is the most pitiful of 
all human infirmities, softening of the back- 
bone is the most base. 

Sand is good ; but if the sand has lost its 
savor, wherewithal shall it be sanded ? 



50 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XIV. 



a T AY out 84 and 96," said the Boss, as the 



tired horses dragged a couple of street 
cars into the big barn. 

' ' What's the matter with them?" asked his 
assistant, looking them over with a critical eye. 

" Played out," replied the Boss, shaking the 
loose dashboard with his hand, and kicking the 
rusty wheels with his foot. 

The hearts of the two old cars sank into their 
boots, as they were trundled away into a dark 
corner. 

Standing there side by side, they exchanged 
many sad and some very bitter words. 

" No more gay runs down the long grade 
into the busy city, No more swift whirls 
around Fountain Square. No more crowds 
of happy children, lovely women, and brave 
men — nothing but silence and idleness and 
misery until we rust and rot and crumble back 
to dust," said Eighty-four. 

"It is the way of the world," muttered 
Ninety-six, through his half-closed door. 
" ' Off with the old and on with the new.' I 
am as stout as I ever was \ but just because I 
rattle a little and am slightly weather-stained, I 




THE OPTIMIST. 



51 



must be thrown into this dark hole, while that 
impudent, smooth-faced, freshly painted No. 
99 is petted and admired and given the 
favorite run." 

After long months of silence and idleness had 
passed by, the two old cars were frightened all 
but to death at hearing the sound of approach- 
ing footsteps and voices. 

" Bring out 84 and 96," cried the Boss. 

"What for?" asked his assistant. 

"Sold," he answered. 

The poor old things trembled and creaked 
and would have wept if they could, but their 
eyes were dry and full of dust. 

" Good-by," they cried to each other, as 
they were coupled on to strange and unknown 
monsters, which ran without horses or mules, 
and pulled off in different directions. 

Bounding along the rails, trembling in every 
joint, terrified by the awful speed, they gave 
themselves up for lost, and frantically specu- 
lated upon the nature of their impending 
doom. 

After a journey which seemed both as long 
as eternity and as quick as a flash of lightning, 
"Eighty-four" found himself at the junction 
of Mitchell avenue and the Carthage pike, and, 
by the aid of stout horses and skilled men, was 
shunted off at the side of the road and left in a 
driving rain. 



52 



THE OPTIMIST. 



" What new misery of idleness awaits me ?" 
he murmured to himself. 

Suddenly a car stopped, and a dozen passen- 
gers stepped out in the mud. 

" Hello ! " cried one, " here's old 4 Eighty- 
four ' standing by the side of the road, with 
his doors wide opened, ready to welcome us 
out of the rain. Many a ride I had in him in 
the old times. Thought he was gone the way 
of all the earth. Tumble in every body and 
get out of the wet. Old cars are good for 
shelter, even when unfit for travel." 

A sudden throb of joy in the heart of the 
old car made the people think he was starting. 

And as for Ninety-six, they put him off at 
Ridgeway avenue, hauled him laboriously up 
the hill and placed him in a dooryard under 
the trees. 

Never in all his life had he received such a 
welcome! Not even when he whirled up to 
Fountain Square in a driving rain ! Not even 
when he had waited patiently an hour beyond 
his time to catch the last group of hurried 
Avondalians who had been to the May 
Festival ! 

Four little boys who lived in the house under 
the eaves of which he stood, danced and sang, 
their little companions whooped and yelled, 
and they all ran in and out and climbed onto 
the seats and clattered over the floor until old 



THE OPTIMIST. 



53 



Ninety-six lost his spectacles and his front 
teeth, and thought the end of the world had 
come. 

" What a playhouse it is! " they cried. 

" Let's call it Grandpa Lodge,'' suggested 
a little girl. And now the old street car. worn 
out and faded, is happy because he has found 
his mission. 

Any one who is useful, ought to be happy. 
All can be useful if they try. We do not al- 
ways have to joggle and bob and rush and tear 
to be useful. We can be useful when shelter- 
ing weary stragglers in our hearts of sympathy 
and holding little children in our hearts of love. 



54 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XV. 

a THERE are you going, and what are you 
V » going for ? " shouted the cheese-box 
which was floating in a little bay, to a barrel 
which was tearing down the current of the great 
river. 

"I don't know," it replied wildly, "but 
6 I'm in the swim/ and I'm happy." 

Logs and casks and boxes and every sort of 
drift-wood were bounding around it, and bump- 
ing against it. It rolled and tumbled and 
swayed amidst the debris, and swept onward 
toward the great ocean, with a smirk upon its 
face, which only at the corners of its mouth 
and to the shrewdest observer, revealed a dis- 
satisfaction and doubt, as to the real sweetness 
of its pleasure. 

In the meantime the poor little cheese-box, 
caught in an eddy, went round and round and 
round, envying the barrel with all the energy 
of its nature, and saying bitterly, " There goes 
the barrel on its brilliant career, passing through 
all sorts of excitement, and beholding every 
variety of scenery. But here am I, in the 
grasp of this spiral current, my orbit growing 
narrower with every revolution, shut up in this 



THE OPTIMIST. 



55 



trifling bay, and chained to a stupid, wretched 
existence.'' 

Xo one ever told the cheese-box that just 
as the barrel rounded the next turn in the river, 
the bow of a passing steamer struck it and 
knocked it into smithereens. But. even if 
they had, the cheese box would probably have 
said, " Better death in the swim than life in 
the eddy ! " 

Every-where in the world the cheese-boxes 
in the eddies, envy the barrels in the swim, 
and, therefore, there must be something divine 
in that impulse that drives us all imperiously 
toward the center of the great stream of ten- 
dencies, and makes us wish to be in the midst 
of the excitement, struggle, danger, and even 
tragedy of life. 

There must be currents setting somewhere. 
There must be great general tendencies and 
movements toward some end or destiny. If 
every individual was a unit, independent in its 
disposition and desires from all others, moving 
off in its own orbit, repelled and repellant, 
how could this common destiny be achieved ? 

There is a necessary suction power in this 
current, or an impulse in the individual toward 
it. Men rush toward great centers as the at- 
mosphere rushes toward a great conflagration 
or moths to an electric light. There is a certain 
fascination and bliss in yielding to an impulse 



56 



THE OPTIMIST. 



or to a current, as in giving way to a passion 
or floating down a river. 

It is useless to deny that there is pleasure in 
being in the swim in politics or business or so- 
ciety. What ! Pleasure in being banged about, 
and battered up, and crowded down, and 
jostled and swept along by irresistible currents 
toward unknown goals, and, perhaps, like the 
barrel, to be smashed or swamped in a mo- 
ment? Yes. You remember the Englishman 
who examined his bloated face in the mirror 
in the morning after his wildest debauch, and, 
while acknowledging the misery and wretched- 
ness of it all, exclaimed: "But it's life, damn 
it, it's life ! " 

Life ? Death, I say. 

But what pleasure there is, let those have it 
who want it. I shall not quarrel with them. 
I do not like the bitter taste it leaves in the 
mouth. I do not like the rivalries and jeal- 
ousies, the alternations of hope and despair, 
the slow and horrible revelation of the empti- 
ness of the struggle for prominence, even when 
there is no self-reproach and remorse. 

I like my quiet little bay, and the eddy that 
carries me round and round, the sight of the old 
familiar scenes and faces, the calm, the repose, 
the flowers that nod over the edges of the bank, 
the time to remember, to grow better and to 
cherish hope. I am not disturbed when the 



THE OPTIMIST. 



57 



barrels put their fingers in their eyes and call 
out, as they scurry past : " Sour grapes ! Sour 
grapes ! " I only hope that some of my friends 
who are in the swim, and have lost their heads 
in the swollen current, will be caught by the 
saving hands of some gentle eddy, as I have 
been. I think that even if I were drawn out 
into the great stream I had rather creep along 
the shore. 

I do not believe that death in the swim is 
better than life in the eddy. 



5S 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XVI. 



HEN Jones was buying his new bicycle, 



* * the dealer told him he did not need a 
brake. 

" How do you get down hill ? " Jones asked. 
"You just back pedal," said the voluble 
young salesman. 
"Oh." 

And so when Jones came to a hilltop, after 
"blowing" himself all but to death in the 
painful assent, he smiled to think of the 
pleasure which lay before him. It was his last 
smile for more than three weeks. 

The first thing he did when he began to go 
down hill was to lose his pedal. 

"Well," said he to himself grimly, "if I 
can 't back pedal, I can ' coast.' " 

Now, the two prime factors in the problem 
of coasting are, the grade, and the bottom of the 
hill. Poor Jones knew nothing about either, 
for he had never traveled that road before. 

The hill was long and steep. He was going 
like a train of cars. He tried to "break" 
with his foot, but did not know how. He was 
getting all the coasting he wanted, and a little 
more. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



59 



"I wonder what kind of a bottom there is 
to it?" he moaned. "If there is a river 
round that bend or a stone fence, I'ma goner. 
I hope it's an easy curve or a sand bank." 

It was neither; but a quick, sharp turn to 
the right. 

As far as speed is concerned he might have 
been shot from a catapult. Grinding his teeth 
together, he gave the handle bar a sharp jerk 
and hoped for 
the best, but 
the momentum 
was too much 
for him. He 
felt himself go- 
ing through the 
air like an old 
shoe thrown at 
a cat. 

The next thing he knew he was being sorted 
out of a rubbish heap by a grim old farmer. 

My friend, do not permit any voluble youth 
to persuade you that you can ride over the 
rough pathway of life without a break. There 
are too many hills with steep grades and un- 
known bottoms. 

Coasting is all right in its place, but when 
you have seen as much of life as I have, you 
will think it ought to be indulged in with 




60 



THE OPTIMIST. 



caution, and that a man ought always to have 
a brake, or, at least, never lose his pedal. 

There is young Tompkins, for example. He 
has been doing altogether too much " coast- 
ing." He struck a long, easy grade, for his 
father was rich and paid all the bills on the 
first day of January. 

But look at him now! The momentum of 
his fast life is too much for him. He is going 
down hill at a killing pace. There is a sharp 
turn that he can make by a great effort, if he 
will ; but if he misses it — good-by Tompkins ! 
For down at the bottom there is a deep pit full 
of broken bicycles and their riders. 

Has the cigarette habit mastered you ? One 
foot is off the pedal. Are you " rushing the 
growler'' and "playing the races?" That 
settles it. Good-by ! 

Our natural appetites and passions are good 
wheels to ride when we control them, but 
they are bad runaways. The trouble is that 
we never know their force until we have " lost 
our pedal " and it is too late to catch it again, 

Some of us gray-haired old fellows have 
seen some bad smash-ups in our day, and we 
want to save you from them, by telling you 
that self-control is the prime essential of man- 
kind. " He that is slow to anger is better 
than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit 
than he that taketh a city." 



THE OPTIMIST. 



61 



This is what Gibbons says of Marcus Aure- 
lius : "At the age of twelve years he embraced 
the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught 
him to submit his body to his mind, and his 
passions to his reason." 

Go thou and do likewise. 



62 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XVII. 

TF you wish to experience a sort of tender 
melancholy, and at the same time have 
your thoughts tuned to a lofty strain, walk 
through the streets of our suburbs at the edge 
of one of these September evenings, when the 
clear sky, the full moon, and the crisp air be- 
token frost. 

In almost every door yard you will see a 
gentle hand covering the flowers with a blan- 
ket, to save them from the withering breath of 
the coming winter. 

Perhaps it is the hand of some fair young 
girl, whose love for the beautiful has just 
opened like the flowers themselves, in her 
pure, aspiring soul. Sometimes it is that of 
the white-haired grandmother, cherishing in 
a heart as fresh as a maiden's, a long-plighted 
devotion to these emanations of that upholding 
love which is the soul of this wide universe. 

It touches the heart to see this fond solicitude 
for these delicate and ephemeral things ! Who 
can look at the hoods which veil the gorgeous 
cannas, the brilliant geraniums, the modest 
asters, the begonias, petunias and chrysanthe- 
mums, without reflecting upon that charity 



THE OPTIMIST. 



63 



which, more and more, as the centuries roll 
on, casts a protecting mantle over all the varied 
forms of weakness and of need which are to be 
seen in this strange world? 

As I stood looking at one of those dear old 
ladies, an evening or so ago, I recalled the 
cold winter nights that used to settle down 
upon the home of my boyhood, and I could 
see my mother standing by the fireplace, with 
a flannel blanket open to its heat, while I pre- 
pared myself for bed. Then came the swift 
rush up the stairs to the frosty chamber, the 
dread plunge between the cold sheets, and the 
warm blanket folded around me like a benedic- 
tion, the good-night kiss, the soothing warmth, 
the joy of life, the bliss of sleep. 

From how many sharp and swift descending 
frosts parental hands have shielded us ! 

With what patient and loving care fathers 
and mothers are hovering over the tender 
flowers that are blooming in the gardens of 
their homes, now that the nipping and eager 
air of life has already begun to blow upon 
them. 

Over how many unprotected heads has the 
mantle of charity been thrown by the loving 
hands of this generation? When we think of 
the lives that have been blasted by the chilling 
frosts of sickness, poverty, and sin, it seems to 
us as if little had been done ; but we must not 



64 



THE OPTIMIST. 



forget that we have succeeded in shielding 
multitudes of orphans, widows, blind, insane, 
and suffering ones. 

Xor can we rightfully forget how many un- 
protected heads and hearts must be covered in 
the winter now approaching. Nature has 
turned a cold shoulder to them. 

" Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. 
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you 
From seasons such as these?" 

Do you ever lie down at night, benumbed 
by the frosts of life, and wish that some hand, 
gentle as a mother's, could wrap a warm blan- 
ket around you, and touch your troubled brow 
with a benediction? 

Have you gathered, out of the manifold ex- 
periences of life, the faith that a great kind 
hand will reach out of the invisible, and cast 
the warm mantle of His love over you, when 
the last frost falls ? 



THE OPTIMIST. 



65 



XVIII. 



HEY say that Mr. and Mrs. Recently 



- Married are drifting apart. 
Were you ever in an open boat without oars, 
when the mighty hands of the ocean tide 
caught it and dragged it away from the shores 
where your loved ones stood helplessly stretch- 
ing out their hands ? 

There are tides in the sea of matrimony. 
They move with tremendous power. Do not 
be caught in the drift ! 

Young " Recently" told me that he could 
feel himself being borne away from his wife 
by an undertow, which he could no more re- 
sist than an ocean current. The distance be- 
tween them was widening, widening, widen- 
ing. When they walk arm in arm, they seem 
to be in different counties. When they take 
their evening meal, the table appears to be as 
broad as a continent. When they sit down 
by the open fireplace, they are like planets on 
the opposite sides of the sun. He says there 
is something agonizing in the sensation of 
touching her hands and looking into her eyes, 
and feeling that their souls are as far apart as 
stars. " It seems like a horrible nightmare," 




66 THE OPTIMIST. 

he said, through his quivering lips, " I now 
know," he added, " the meaning of the old 
song, ' Thou Art so Near and Yet so Far !' " 

It came about in this way. 

When Recently came home one night he 
found his wife in a state of agitation border- 
ing on frenzy. It happened once, twice, three 
times, and finally became chronic. 

Housekeeping absorbed her mind and agi- 
tated her nerves. She could think of nothing 
else and talk of nothing else. And so Re- 
cently was compelled night after night and 
month after month to listen to tedious, irri- 
tating repetitions of petty worries with grocer 
boys and servant girls. The talk itself was ex- 
asperating ; but when he clearly saw that his 
wife was so ignoble and small as to allow these 
trivial things to stifle all her larger sympa- 
thies and instincts, he began to crawl into 
himself to get away from her. 

When he ventured to tell some of his own 
troubles, she said: "What would you do if 
you had a dish-nicking, eavesdropping, butter- 
stealing servant girl to deal with ?" 

If he tried to cheer her up with some gay 
pictures of the life at the store, she murmured 
" that she was in no mood to enjoy such non- 
sense, with all her household cares preying on 
her heart." 

One day he said to her : "I am dead tired 



THE OPTIMIST. 



67 



of all this stuff about servant girls and gro- 
cery boys. I have enough troubles of my 
own, without having a freshet of these trivial 
worries rolled over me every night." 

She burst into tears and said: "You are 
an unfeeling thing. A wife ought to have at 
least one friendly ear into which to pour her 
troubles." 

"I am willing you should chose one of my 
ears into which to pour all the wretchedness 
of the day/' he retorted, " if you would only 
whisper in the other, a few words of happiness 
and good cheer. Sing to me, laugh for me. 
Tell me only in a single phrase now and then 
that you love me and are happier here than 
you could be anywhere else. I am lonesome. 
There is a sense of utter isolation coming 
over me. Two years ago when I was out in 
Colorado and you were in London I could 
look up at the moon, and simply because you 
had seen it a few hours before, feel that you 
were by my side, although we were thousands 
of miles apart ! And now I feel as if hydraulic 
pressure could not force us together." 

When he repeated this conversation to me in 
a burst of confidence, I scolded him well for it, 
and made him promise to go home and apolo- 
gize. 

But I wish I dared tell Mrs. Recently Mar- 



68 



THE OPTIMIST. 



ried that men like to take servant girls and 
grocery boys in homoeopathic doses. 

I think that husbands and wives ought to be 
as careful to talk to each other about bright 
and cheerful things, as to the people they meet 
at receptions. This vice is not all on one side 
of the house, however. There is Ruggles for 
example. His wife's nervous prostration was 
the direct result of his merciless rehash of the 
meanness of his customers and clerks. 

If he had kept the old bright smile upon his 
lips she would still have had the bloom of the 
peach in her cheek. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



69 



XIX. 



E have all the natural possibilities for the 



* * most beautiful city in the world. But 
even if we should realize them, they could not 
be appreciated while the black pall of soft coal 
smoke hangs above our spires and hilltops. 

May the day be hastened when every chim- 
ney which now spouts out its nastiness shall 



have a smoke-consumer. I propose an es- 
cutcheon for Cincinnati. It is a tall stack, 
vomiting out clouds, in which are to be seen 
the words, 



It will have a double value, for it will be as 
good a motto for the citizen as for the city. 





" Burn vour own smoke." 



70 



THE OPTIMIST. 



The average man is like a Cincinnati chim- 
ney. Above his head hang clouds of soot. 
He exists in darkness and sorrow himself, and 
forces his neighbors to live in the clouds which 
he exhales. " Burn your own smoke ! " 

Perhaps you have a physical infirmity. Is 
it rheumatism, neuralgia, or that grand climac- 
teric, dyspepsia ? It clouds your life and lies 
like a gloomy background behind all the joyous 
scenes of human existence. It colors all your 
plans and purposes and opinions. You can 
not be unconscious of it. You can not help 
thinking about it, and hitherto you have never 
ceased to talk about it. You puff it into the 
faces of all the people you meet, until at last 
they dodge across the street to avoid you, and 
when they do encounter you, they groan in 
spirit and gasp for breath. Get a smoke-con- 
sumer, neighbor. 

Perhaps you have some great heart sorrow. 
In the vanished years, death stole into your 
household and robbed you of its dearest occu- 
pant ; or misfortune crept stealthily upon you and 
swept away your property ; or a bosom friend 
deceived and betrayed you. Since that time 
you have not been the same man. This violent 
wrench has wrecked your old world. It is the 
unvarying theme of your discourse. No mat- 
ter into what other channel the conversation 
is turned, it soon digs back into the old bed. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



71 



We have stood it as long as we can, neighbor. 
We have troubles, too. "Burn your own 
smoke." 

Perhaps you have doubts — suspicions as to 
the fundamental ideas of religion, fears as to 
the final outcome of existence; dark and 
skeptical notions as to the value of life itself. 

But what call have you to pour that black 
cloud into the faces of your friends ? It is 
more than likely that just such feelings exist in 
their minds, for such exhalations rise from the 
soul as inevitably as mists from a marsh, and it 
is merciless in you to add the weight and dark- 
ness of your own, to the burden which they are 
trying to roll away. And if they still trust un- 
questionably in the hopes which, in your 
misery, you call delusions, why should you 
steal them away with your questioning and 
doubts ? If they are trying to keep the lace 
curtains over the windows of their soul white 
and clean, it is little less than infamous in you 
to turn the soot of your smoky chimney on 
them. "Burn your own smoke." 

How the moral atmosphere of a home or a 
city would clear if all of us would keep our 
sufferings and sorrows and doubts to ourselves 
for a whole year ! The most of them are so 
entirely imaginary or exaggerated that if we 
kept them a little longer in the fires of our own 
heart they would all burn up. 



72 



THE OPTIMIST. 



I know an old man of more than 80 years, 
and he has troubles enough to make a whole 
community sad; but he burns his own smoke, 
or all, at least, that is consumable. And as 
for the rest ? It rises to heaven and is purified 
by that divine atmosphere ! 

There is always a residuum of pain, always 
an unconsumable element of sadness, always 
a little incombustible smoke in every human 
life. How it would settle down upon the race 
and stifle it, save for the breezes of hope that 
sweep down from the sky ! We are saved by 
hope! 

Burn up what smoke you can, and commit 
the rest to the gales of heaven. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



73 



XX. 



HE Major al.vays rushes out of his home 



pell rnell, and runs for the electric car, 
just as he used to do for the old Avondale 
'bus, when it made but a single trip in the 
day. 

He turned a corner, and all but tumbled 
over a colored man who stood looking at a 
half-finished building. 

" Beg pardon," said the Major, half blown 
with his exertion. " Fine morning," he added, 
anxious to be civil. 

' ' Would be if I was at work," replied the 
colored man. 

Something in these few brief words arrested 
the attention and touched the heart of the kind 
old soldier, for he had been out of a job him- 
self not many months before, and he knew 
how somber the world looks through jobless 
eyes. 

What were the autumn trees and the beauty 
of the Indian summer to a man who had a wife 
and five little children waiting for him to come 
home with their daily bread, and he standing 
before a house where work had stopped — in 
his upperless shoes and ragged overalls, and 




74 



THE OPTIMIST. 



holding an empty, dinner pail in his idle 
hand ? 

When the Major had drawn this story out 
of him by a few kindly questions, he placed a 
fifty cent piece in the man's hand. 

The poor fellow looked at it a moment with 
gleaming eyes, and said: "Boss, I ain't seen 
one for five weeks." 

" Why, bless my soul," exclaimed the Major. 
"Why, say, that's tough, downright tough. 
Look here, I '11 feel easier if I divide up a 
little. I am better off than you are to-day, 
but there's no telling where I'll be to-morrow. 
Wheel is going round mighty fast. Men on 
top are not far from the bottom these times! 
A man in a pair of blue overalls with an empty 
dinner pail, out of a job — that gets me ! " . 

By this time he had forgotten all about the 
electric car, and was hurrying the colored man 
homeward at a lively rate. 

"There!" he exclaimed — a quarter of an 
hour later, as he saw his new-found friend 
looking as bright as a blazing chunk of Camp- 
bell's Creek coal, trudging off down the street 
with a suit of clothes under his arm, and a sack 
of flour and a piece of bacon on his shoulder — 
" I feel better." 

He talked to himself sometimes, and I over- 
heard him spluttering as he trotted off to the 
car : " Lord o' -mercy ! A wife and five chil- 



THE OPTIMIST. 



75 



dren! How would I feel if I was in his fix? 
I have been through the mill myself, but I was 
never ground up quite so fine as that ! Times 
are hard ; they 're mighty hard, and there is n't 
work enough to go round, and I know it. Out 
of a job ! After all, that is the saddest song I 
know. To have a hand and a heart for work — 
and nothing to do. 

' ' I feel better, any way. Took some chances, 
I suppose. There is no more perilous point 
in the whole dangerous pilgrimage of any 
man's life than the one where he accepts his 
first alms ! 

' 6 Hope to the good Governor above that I 
hav n't helped make a beggar out of the poor 
fellow ! Easy way to get a living — just ask 
for it ! 

"But you can't let men starve ! Have to 
take some chances of doing them harm and 
encouraging them to pauperism, when you find 
them in a pinch like that." 

"That's the worst thing about these hard 
times ! Thousands of honorable, self-support- 
ing men will be rolled under, lose heart and 
crawl out from beneath the crush — paupers, 
beggars ! God help them ! I hope Sambo 
has got more moral courage than maybe I 
would have. 

"I did the best I knew. The time has 
come to divide up ! Somehow, we are all in 



76 



THE OPTIMIST. 



the same boat. One touch of sorrow makes 
the whole world kin. I felt as though that 
fellow was my own brother ! What was that 
he said? — ' Would be a nice morning if I had 
work ! ' 

"Looks nice to me now, and hope it does 
to him. 

" Hello, there ! stop that car ! " 



THE OPTIMIST. 



77 



XXI. 



IRST, I heard the tinkle of the scissors 



grinder's bell. 
Then, as he bent to his task, the whirr of 
the emery wheel gnawing at the edge of the 
dull old butcher knife, came merrily in at my 
study window. 

When his task was done, the maid brought 
up his modest bill. 

Not having a nickel, I sent him a dime, and 
bade him keep the balance with the compli- 
ments of a well-wisher to an honest toiler, the 
reward of whose industry seemed inadequately 



He sent me back a message — that swarthy, 
serious, low-browed Italian, which would read 
well upon the tombstone of a great man. It 
was : "I take no pay for work not done." 

" Great heavens!*' said I to myself, rushing 
to the door to get a glimpse of a man — a man, 
mark you — poor, indeed, and ignorant, no 
doubt; but sound to the core, and ennobled 
by that first of all the qualifications of man- 
hood, a feeling of invincible, uncompromising, 
uncorruptible independence. 

"We gave him another knife to grind, and 




small. 



78 



THE OPTIMIST. 



when his task was, done he placed his money, 
earned by honest toil, in the pocket of his cor- 
duroy trousers, and started down the street, 
tinkling his bell steadily, the embodiment of 
self-respecting, charity-spurning, self-sustaining 
manhood. 

Measure, if you can, the difference between 
him and the beggar, in whom that divine light 
of independence has been extinguished, and 
who stands at your door pleading for an alms 
with a whimper, and cursing you if it is with- 
held. 

I know too well the terrible temptation to 
which the pauper has been exposed, the long 
sickness, the lost position, the months of pov- 
erty, the first alms, bestowed in love and re- 
ceived in helplessness, the final collapse and 
disintegration of that divine feeling of inde- 
pendence. 

But, however it was undermined, by what- 
ever misfortune or guilt it was lost, when it is 
once gone, it leaves a pitiful ruin behind it, for 
it is the keystone to the arch. 

It was this uncompromising independence 
that lent such charm to the character of Robert 
Burns. He would be put under obligation to 
no man. He not only refused to be paid for 
work not done, but sometimes for work which 
had been done. "By heaven," said he to a 
publisher who offered him money for songs, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



79 



4 'they shall either be invaluable or of no value. 
I do not want your guineas for them.''' 

Such a man was Garibaldi. After placing 
two kingdoms at the feet of Victor Emanuel, 
he asked for no reward and would take no aid. 
but he started for Caprera with a sack of pota- 
toes and a capital of fourteen shillings, to begin 
life over again. 

And this spirit still survives in the world. 
We sent an offer of help to some poor people 
in a neighboring church a few days ago. 
'•God's people take no alms," was the reply 
of the pastor. 

I shall never listen to the tinkle of a scissors 
grinder's bell again without hearing in its mo- 
notonous tones those simple, unpoetical, but no- 
ble words : " I take no pay for work not done. " 

Fight your own battles. Refuse all gifts 
which compromise your manhood or sap your 
independence. Thank God for all others. 

'•'Lean on your own dinner/' was the rude 
but comprehensible advice which one boy gave 
to another in my day, when some one rested 
an arm upon his shoulder to watch a wrestling 
match or a ball game. 

My swarthy Italian leaned upon his own din- 
ner — God bless him ! And I doubt not that he 
will have a good dinner to lean upon so long 
as he can tinkle his bell or hold a knife to the 
wheel. 



80 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXII. 

I 7HAT an infernal grind life is," said 
* * Dobbin, throwing himself wearily 
into his chair, after a long day's work, and a 
vain effort to relish his evening meal. "A 
man is nothing but a packhorse, a galley slave. 
Life is nothing but a treadmill. Necessity 
forces us into it in the morning, we tramp all 
day without making any progress, and creep 




out at night with a tired body and an aching 
heart. It 's a weary, hopeless, tedious round 
of unsatisfying tasks. I wish to goodness I 
could get off the infernal machine and never 
get on again." Mrs. Dobbin brought his slip- 
pers, lighted his pipe, pushed his hair back 



THE OPTIMIST. 



si 



with a caressing touch, sat down opposite, and 
smiled. 

" Well," said the galley slave, a little gruffly, 
" what are you smiling at ? " 

"I was thinking of those six weeks you 
spent at the sea shore last summer, and how 
you chafed like a polar bear in a cage, and 
said you would give a hundred dollars for just 
one day in the office with a typewriter clicking, 
the telephone bell ringing, messenger boys 
coming with telegrams, and the drays rolling 
out of the alley, loaded with boxes." 

"That's just it," answered the packhorse, 
with a sort of growl. " The whole scheme is 
a beastly blunder. When we are at work we 
hate labor, and when we are idle we loathe 
rest." 

"Yes," said Mrs. Dobbin, in her soothing 
way, "when we are all tired out at night, life 
looks like a hopeless tangle, and when we get 
up rested in the morning we seize the end of 
the thread and courageously ravel out a little 
more. We ought to estimate life by the im- 
pression it makes upon us in the morning, 
Dobbin." 

Dobbin's library was full of books, but there 
was not in any of them more sound sense than 
in those last few words. 

For one, I believe that life is what it seems 
in our best and brightest hours, 



82 



THE OPTIMIST. 



The cynic says : " There are as many tired 
evenings as there are rested mornings, and 
there are more disappointments than realiza- 
tions. Why do you say, then, that life is 
what it seems at its best ? Why is it not what 
it seems at its worst 

I can not tell ; but I know that it is not, and 
so does the cynic. " Why should we measure 
life by its lowest phases, or faith by its lowest 
water mark ? If I lose faith in man one hour 
out of twenty-four, in the twenty-three hours 
of faith I will do my work for humanity," 
said David Swing. "It is not the ebb and 
flow of common hours, but the great floodtide 
that leaves the highest mark upon the sand, to 
which our souls may again aspire." 

The true measurement of Phil Sheridan's 
horse was not to be taken when cropping grass 
in the pasture, but when tearing down the 
road to Winchester. Humanity is not what it 
seemed to be in the dark ages, but in the days 
of Pericles and Augustus and Elizabeth. 

Dobbin is not to be judged by what he is 
at night in his slippers and his grumbling 
gown, but by what he is when, like a noble 
fellow, he mounts his treadmill in the morning, 
full of hope and purpose. 

Life is a treadmill. There is an irresistible 
pathos in the picture of earth's weary millions 
tramping their ceaseless, weary round. But 



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83 



what a grist they are grinding in that mill ! 
What a grist Dobbin himself has ground! He 
has three noble boys, as many lovely girls, 
a happy home, a solid business, and has done 
multitudinous deeds of kindness and of love 
which only the pen of the good angel has re- 
corded. 

We grumble at life, but it is not less life 
that any of us want. It is more ! 

ki Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly longed for death ! 
' T is life — whereof our nerves are scant, 
O life, not death, for which we pant. 
More life and fuller that I want ! " 



^4 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXIII. 



OUNG Blunderbuss sat watching a famous 



Doctor of Divinity, who was boiling the 
coffee for a party of picknickers. 

He was silent a long time, while the sparks 
snapped, the water seethed, the smoke floated 
away into the heavens, and the great coffee 
maker fed the fire with dainty little sticks of 
dried pine, which he had carefully chopped in 
the wood-shed before coming to the grove. 

" Humph !" said Young Blunderbuss, at 
last. 

" What 's the matter?" inquired the Doctor, 
lifting his keen blue eyes. 

•'I was thinking/' he replied, " how the 
natural characteristics of men reveal them- 
selves in the most trivial things. If I were 
making that coffee, I should have gath- 
ered up a cord or two of wood, some of it 
green, some punky and some rotten, thrown 
it all in a pile, used up a box of matches 
lighting it, blinded my eyes with smoke in 
blowing up a flame, burned off the handle 
and the cover of the coffee pot, and at last 
surrounded the coffee with such a conflagra- 




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85 



tion that I could not have reached it when it 
was done.'' 5 

"And here you are. with a dainty stone oven, 
a little bundle of kindlings hardly larger than 
wooden toothpicks, a coffee pot clean enough 
for a breakfast table and an aroma strong and 
divine enough to overpower the smell of burn- 
ing wood. Such is the difference in men." 

"Why," said the Doctor, smoothing his 
breast with a downward stroke of both hands, 
as he did when well pleased with himself, 
"that is nothing — to make coffee with such 
great sticks of wood as these. One day, by 
the side of a trout stream in the Rocky Moun- 
tains, I told six men with whom I was fishing, 
and who were mourning because there was no 
wood to cook a dinner with, that I could boil 
the coffee with a fire made from a copy of the 
New York Tribune (and it was not a Sunday 
edition, either.) 

"Two of them made a bet (to which I was 
not a party, mind you) that I could not do it. 
But I did it, just the same." 

And then he stroked his double-breasted 
coat with his two hands once more, smiled, 
opened the lid of the pot, and drew into his 
expansive nostrils a long, delicious whiff of the 
celestial aroma. 

" Gee!" said young Blunderbuss. 

I was a third member of the little group, 



86 



THE OPTIMIST. 



and had my own reflections about men and 
things. 

Young Blunderbuss was right. There is a 
mighty difference in men, and it is nowhere 
more marked than in their methods of ex- 
tracting from the elements of life its divine 
essence of satisfaction and joy. 

I know many people who do just what he 
said he would — gather mountainous heaps of 
money, of land, of houses, of pictures, of 
food, of clothing, and, as it were, set them all 
on fire to stew out that divine liquor we call 
human happiness. But they only waste their 
firewood, spoil the pot and blind themselves 
with the smoke. And I have also met a few 
people like the Doctor. You shall see them 
in some retired nook, a little cottage, perhaps, 
or a room in an apartment house, or a cabin 
by a lake (like Thoreau's), who will take an 
old book, a dog and gun, a banjo (a few lit- 
tle slivers of firewood) and with them distill 
a sort of ambrosial drink, rich beyond words, 
and potent with the bliss of being. In this 
life it is not so necessary that we should have 
much firewood, as that we know how to burn a 
little. 



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87 



XXIV. 



HERE has been a very small, little tragedy 



enacted during the past week in every 
home out of which a sensitive child has gone 
for the first time to the public school. 

When little Bill started off, his big father 
who was leading him by the hand swallowed a 
large-sized lump in his throat, and his mother 
stood in the window wiping her eyes until her 
' ' baby" was out of sight, and then, throwing 
herself upon the bed, sobbed as if he were 
gone forever. As for poor little Bill — when he 
entered that schoolyard and heard three hun- 
dred children screeching like crows in a corn- 
field, and then passed into the presence of the 
august and awful school-teacher, he endured a 
nervous excitement and suffered a strain as 
great as William Jennings Bryan did on the 
night of the election. 

When he came home last Monday night this 
particular little Bill, a dear little friend of mine, 
was pale as a corpse, could not swallow a 
mouthful of food, tossed all night in restless 
sleep, and waked his papa and mamma at 4:30 
in the morning, " so as to be sure and not let 
him be late !" 




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"I am afraid he is not well enough to go/' 
said Bill, the senior, who never could endure 
to see any living thing suffer, especially a 
child. 

"Yes, I am, papa/' responded the little 
hero. "I know I must go, for I must learn 
how to read, so as to be a big man. But my 
head is hot, and I guess you better bandage it, 
and give me a cold bath !" 

There is courage, let me tell you ! Many a 
soldier has achieved immortal fame with less ! 
'/ Poor little kid !" said his father, "his troubles 
have begun and they will never end." And a 
tender look came into his eyes, which showed 
how deeply he wished that he could shield 
him, and gather all the keen arrows of suffer- 
ing into his own heart. 

Be gentle with those delicate little beings to 
whom a school-teacher is as august a being as 
Jehovah was to Moses ! 

I can remember when I entered the old 
"Auburn Academy" as well as if it was yester- 
day — and it was a good many yesterdays ago, 
you may be sure ! I have never since passed 
through a more terrible ordeal. My head. was 
hot, and I needed a bandage and a cold bath, 
like little Bill. 

When his father told me what the little fel- 
low said, I did not know whether to laugh or 
to cry. It was pathetic beyond words, for the 



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89 



suffering was genuine, and poignant as yours 
and mine. 

But it was funny, too, for there are a good 
many big boys around the country about this 
time who can not eat their suppers at night, 
who toss upon their pillows, and wake from a 
feverish sleep at half-past four with their heads 
so hot that they need a compress and a cold 
bath. 

Little Bill's father confessed that it was so 
with him, and I know scores of brave men 
who are in the same boat ! 

These are times which try men's souls. 

What business men need to-day is the cour- 
age of little Bill. 

Perhaps some of you will have to go home 
and tell your wives and children that you must 
sell your beautiful home, and move into a little 
cottage, or face your creditors and tell them 
that you have gotten to the end of your rope. 

That will be hard, God knows ! but it was 
hard for little Bill to go to school. 

"I must be a man," said he, "and so you 
had better bandage my head, give me a cold 
bath, and let me go." 

Hurrah for little Bill ! 



90 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXV. 

T7*ROM my study window I can see a little 
child in a white pinafore, wandering over 
the lawn like a tiny cloud in a summer sky 
or a pure dream in the soul of a slumbering 
saint. 

Now and then she stoops to pick a dandelion, 
and she passes them through her fingers with 




the tenderness with which the converted Zac- 
cheus might have counted out his golden eagles 
for sweet charity. 

I know a man who is driven into paroxysms 
of resentment by the sight of a dandelion, as 
some women are into those of revulsion by the 
sight of a cat, or hay-fever patients into fits of 
sneezing by the odor of new mown hay. It is 



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91 



because they spoil his lawn, the love of which 
is creditable to him. But any man who was 
brought up in America and has no love of a 
dandelion in his soul is like the man who hath 
no music in it, and is 

"Fit for treason, stratagems and spoils; 
The motions of his spirit are dull as night. 
And his affections dark as Erebus. 
Let no such man be trusted. 

Speaking for myself, dandelions are the 
golden ducats that pay my fare back over the 
railroad of memory into the ever-receding land 
of childhood. They are the 1 i Christofers " 
in the realm of sight, as spearmint and violets 
are in that of odors, and bear me over the 
river of time that flows between me and those 
dear and distant -days. 

In those first spring mornings when they 
issue from the lawns by day. as the stars from 
heaven at night, in memory I go wandering, 
again barefooted through the old " Meridian " 
meadows. I feel the cool, fresh grass creep- 
ing about my legs, follow the ground-bird to 
its new-made nest under a mullein leaf, count 
its speckled eggs in wondering delight, dam 
the rivulet that murmers through the field and 
hang my little wheel beneath the waterfall. 

Once more I suck the spring water through 
the dandelion stems or weave them into chains, 
split them with my tongue, rolling them into 



92 



THE OPTIMIST. 



spirals in my mouth and shaking them out into 
curls like those which hung over the coral ears 
of Miss Jerusha. the dear old spinster whom 
we all called ••Aunt.'" and. if I must tell it after 
all these years, putting them under the chin, 
that beautifully rounded chm of little Susie 
Ingham, ostensibly to see by the reflection 
of golden light upon the transparent skin 
••whether she loved butter." but really by get- 
ting a better look into her big blue eyes to see 
whether she loved me better than she did 
" Chub Coppernall." 

Ah. we never forget the eyes and cheeks 
and lips and chins that first aroused the divine 
madness in our hearts, as we never forget the 
mountains and the rivers which first awakened 
oar admiration of the beautiful. 

Nor were the charms of the dandelion's 
gray old age less powerful than those of his 
lusty youth. To pick the silver globe with 
anxious care, puff out the boyish cheeks and 
blow the tiny seeds upon a thousand different 
journeys on the summer air. to watch them 
until the last had vanished in the grass, and 
dream and dream and dream. Ah, that was 
life! 

I know a gentleman whose little girl crept 
into his lap with her arms full of dandelions 
(dent de lion — the lion's tooth), and said to 



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93 



him : "If I was a little dandelion in a meadow, 
would you pick me first of ail?"' 

The arch little elf! I suspect that by this 
time there are youngsters roving through the 
meadows who will snatch the precious blossom 
from the old man's hands. 

But none of them could ever feel toward her 
quite as he did when he folded her to his heart 
and said : " I would pick you hrst of a million 
flowers in a thousand-acre lot ! " 



94 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXVI. 



HE arrival of distinguished visitors in our 



A city is chronicled by the daily press. 
One has come whose presence means more 
than a visit from the Czar of all the Russias. 
But no reporter met him. His name is not 
upon any hotel register. He came unheralded 
and alone. Slipping quietly across the river 
and over the roofs of the great city, he rubbed 
his eyes and coughed quietly to remove the 
smoke and soot, and then announced his pres- 
ence by a heavenly song from a treetop in 
Avondale. Windows were opened, and the 
faces of his friends were wreathed in smiles. 
Old age paused upon its cane to listen. Youth 
looked up from its sports and heard the song 
of the robin with unutterable rapture. 

He has come, the joyous messenger, the 
red-breasted nuncio of the approaching spring, 
first spray drop of the advancing tide of bird 
life that is rolling northward like a flood, and 
which will soon break in billows of melody 
against our forest trees. What countless mul- 
titudes of birds there are ! God has made 
enough so that every child from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, from the gulf to the Canadian 




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95 



border, may some time, in the round year, hear 
that happiest of songs. I can not think of 
any deprivation more unutterably sad than that 
of having to live in some spot where the robins 
do not sing. 

That sweet, clear note was one of those 
celestial influences that awakened me to self- 
consciousness. I can see myself now, stand- 
ing in open-eyed wonder beneath a maple tree 
in the little village street, and listening in awe 
to that mysterious song that seemed to float 
out of the infinite. 

To me, the robin's song has been a more 
sacred timepiece than holidays or rising con- 
stellations. All life is rhythmic in its move- 
ments, and consists of looking backward and 
forward to the tune of the robin's song. It is 
not only that the music is ineffably sweet, but 
that the bird itself is the token of the return- 
ing life of the world. I hear the summer 
breezes in its song, and see the summer flow- 
ers upon its bosom. 

I doubt if in all the world there is a living 
thing that imparts more joy to life than a robin, 
with the sole exception of nature's greatest 
wonder and blessing, a little child. 

How many hours of every life have been 
passed in listening to his never tedious song, 
in watching his antics on the lawn, or the glow 
of his bosom in the tree tops ! Could there 



96 



THE OPTIMIST. 



be any thing sweeter than to have the last act 
of consciousness — like that first — linked with 
a robin's song; to hear him trilling his hopeful 
lay as " the casement slowly grows a glimmer- 
ing square," and the faces of loved ones grow 
dim and disappear ? 

But he does more than sing. He builds ! 
It is a tiny edifice that he erects, but still he is 
a builder. It is something to have constructed 
in this world of crumbling forms one little nest. 
And in that nest he and his mate will accom- 
plish that perpetual miracle of nature — the re- 
production of themselves. With wondering 
eyes we shall watch the tiny eggs, the brood- 
ing mother, the food-bringing father, the new 
born babes, the fluttering wings, and then at 
last — the vacant nest. It is our life in minia- 
ture. 

" God shield ye, heralds of the spring, 
Ye faithful swallows, fleet of wing; 

Houps, cuckoos, nightingales, 
Turtles, and every wilder bird, 
That makes your hundred chirpings heard 
Through the green woods and dales." 



THE OPTIMIST. 



97 



XXVII. 



HE "scorchers" who ride from Utica to 



Clinton end their journey at the village 



Young Topsyturvey came tearing up the 
road on his wheel, and, just as he reached 
the curb-stone, gave a wild glance over his 
shoulder. His jaw fell, a look of unutterable 
astonishment overspread his countenance, and 
he tumbled from his seat a helpless lump. 

" What 's the matter ? " cried the bystander, 
as he came to himself, after they had dashed 
some water from the fountain into his purple 
face. 

"Wasn't there any one behind me?" he 
asked, with a bewildered look. 

"Not a soul," they answered, gazing down 
the cinder path. 

"Well," said the crestfallen Topsyturvey, 
" I '11 tell you how it was. Just as I left New 
Hartford there was a fellow in a red ' sweater ' 
rode up behind me and sang out, ' Get out 
of my road, young fellow ! ' 

" Now, I never take anybody's cinders if I 
can help it, and I began to scorch. I heard 
his knee cords snap, and his wheel chewing 




park. 



98 



THE OPTIMIST. 



the path. I opened the throttle and gave her 
head. I have ridden hard before, but never 
like that. His front wheel touched my rear 
one, and once he nearly turned me over. A 
hard burst put me out of his reach ; but I 
could hear his tire biting the dust ; and every 
now and then its sharp pop as a gravel stone 
snapped out from under it. 

<; He followed me like my shadow. I could 
not get away from him any more than a man 
can from the back of his head. The sound of 
that tire grew louder and louder, or at least it 
seemed to me as if it did. Its steady grinding 
made a noise like thunder in my ears. It fol- 
lowed me like destiny, hissing in a maddening 
way, 6 I '11 beat you yet; I '11 beat you yet.' 

" But, gentlemen, to make a long story 
short, it seems that for some time past, how 
long I can not tell, it has been the rear wheel 
of my own Rambler to which I have been 
listening, and I have been trying to beat 
myself. And now, if any of you are thirsty, 
we will adjourn to Boot's drug store and test 
his ginger ale." 

The corks popped. The liquid gurgled in 
the necks of the bottles. The delighted by- 
standers raised the glasses to their lips, tipped 
their heads backward, and gurgled in reply. 

As they drank, Topsyturvey propounded 



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99 



the following sentiment, and advanced these 
brief remarks : 

" Gentlemen — ' The steady wheeler. ' 

''This is an age of feverish unrest. A 
universal epidemic of raging pulses is afflicting 
humanity. Its heart is no longer an organ. 
It is a trip hammer. There is a motive, 
which, like the rod of Aaron, bids fair to 
swallow up all others — a motive coarse and 
vulgar past all words. It is — to beat ! To 
beat for what — nobody knows ! To merely be 
ahead, to outdo the rest, to make more 
money, live in better style, do a bigger busi- 
ness, draw a bigger crowd, outstrip the fastest 
rider — for no other reason in the world, but 
just to do it — this is the insanity which is 
driving the human race along the pathway 
of life, like a wild-cat engine, from whose cab 
the engineer has fallen in a swoon. We are 
likely to become a race of 'scorchers/ with a 
bicycle face for a countenance and a hump for 
a back. I have been the leader of the fools. 
And now, at last, my craze to beat the other 
man has culminated in this mad effort to ride 
aw ay from my own hind wheel ! I am done ! 
I propose to reduce my bicycle gear from 72 
to 66, and if the wheels in my head need to be 
altered they must take their turn." 

He has gained ten pounds of flesh since 
this singular adventure. He lives a calmer 



100 



THE OPTIMIST. 



and nobler life. Old habits are hard to break, 
however, and he sometimes forgets himself. 
But when he does, his bright-faced wife says to 
him in her gentle way, "There is no one 
pushing you, Topsy. You hear your own 
rear wheel." 



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101 



XXVIIL 

6i N ' T a P e the sill y bus J bee— 

His rashness can't be beat; 
He stores up honey, as you see, 
Which other people eat.*' 

These words by a poet of the Milwaukee 
Sentinel are only "nice" because they are 
"naughty." 




The man who did this stanza write 

Is verily a heathen. 
His sting is hidden in his song; 

Beware of the poet bee, then. 

I can take a joke, and reckon this to be one. 
The province of humor is as broad as the 
world, and perhaps the universe. Victor 



102 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Hugo, in describing Gwynplaine kissing the 
beautiful arm of Dea, says: ' ' These are the 
things at which the good God in his quality 
of old philosopher smiles!" There is a smile 
as well as a tear upon the face of Nature. More 
laughs than groans upon her lips, I think. 

But the sentiment in this quatrain is the 
creed of so many cynics whom we meet that 
one can not read it without a sigh, and feels a 
little shudder, as when he hears a joke upon 
the grave. 

Every man who has pondered the problem 
of human life knows in the depths of his heart 
that it is not the honey which he eats, but that 
which he hives for others, out of which he gets 
true happiness. 

Ask that sweet young mother, from what she 
derives the most pleasure — the mere gustation 
of her morning meal, or the secretion of the 
milk which her cooing, radiant, laughing babe 
will draw from her bosom? 

Ask the father whether he feels more satis- 
faction in the bicycle which he rides himself 
or the one on which his little Bill goes scorch- 
ing down the street? Ask the noble Garfield 
whether he found his deepest joy in the feel- 
ings of his own heart when he took his presi- 
dential oath, or in those of his aged mother, 
whom he turned to kiss? 

The pleasure of honey in the mouth to 



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103 



honey in the hive is as one to a thousand ! In 
some ways times have changed, but it is still 
more blessed to give than to receive ! 

This is not mere sentiment, extravagance, 
gush. We derive more pleasure from antici- 
pation than realization. This is a law of our 
being. It is also a law that we find a deeper 
happiness in the emotions of gladness which 
rouse in other bosoms than our own. You 
may think this a strange principle to be in na- 
ture, but at least you can not alter it. 

Did you ever stop to think how we are liv- 
ing on the honey stored up in this great hive 
by the myriad human bees who have hummed 
through these meadows before us? By what 
ceaseless toil did they distill the sweetness on 
which we live, and how patiently secrete the 
sacred treasures which make our modern life a 
blessing ! Think of the honey of our litera- 
ture ! and hear the buzzing of the wings 
of the Homers. Virgils. Dantes. in the fields 
of Hymettus ; of our art. and recall the toil of 
Phidias. Praxiteles, of Raphael and Angelo; 
of our science, and hear the painful droning 
in the long and weary nights of Ptolemy, of 
Aristotle, of Galileo. Newton. Darwin: of our 
civil government, and picture to yourself the 
weary wandering of Moses. Solon. Charle- 
magne, Cromwell. Washington. Lincoln, 
through the pathless fields of the speculation. 



104 



THE OPTIMIST. 



of our religion, and imagine, if you can, the 
gropings of Confucius, Buddha, Abraham, 
Plato, and Jesus alone in the wilderness, the 
garden, the judgment hail, the sepulcher, dy- 
ing, in order that they might wrest from the 
mysteries of nature some great truths for other 
generations yet to come ! 

And what are you doing in the meadows? 
Have you ever added a tiny drop of sweetness, 
distilled from your own life, to the sacred 
stores upon which your children and your chil- 
dren's children may derive some joy? 



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105 



XXIX. 

ii TT 'S a boy ! Mother and baby doing well ! 

* Shake: Yours, TOM." 

Every day this message flashes over the 
wires. The operators smile when they send 
it, and the electric fluid always travels a little 
faster when it bears it, and the hearts that re- 
ceive it beat more freely. 

This morning The Tribune will find its way 
into more than one home where a young 
mother's eyes are suffused with tears that issue 
from the depths of a divine gladness, and 
where a father tiptoes to a cradle side half 
choked with pride and joy. 

Of all the events which the newspapers will 
chronicle to-day, nothing will compare in inter- 
est and importance with that which this tele- 
gram announces. 

The little pilgrim who has landed on this 
bank and shoal of time after his voyage from 
the dim unknown may have brought with him 
some message for which humanity has been 
waiting 50,000 years. 

Socrates, Buddha, and Zoroaster came in the 
same quiet way. Jesus Christ was once a little 
babe in swaddling bands. For all you know, 



106 



THE OPTIMIST. 



that tiny form in the cradle, if it chance to be 
a girl, maybe the real ''new woman" come 
among us to incarnate that new ideal which 
seems struggling for manifestation. 

It will be a good thing for you, Tom, when 
you creep upstairs to take your last look before 
starting down town, when you turn down the 
soft coverlid and feel a strange choking, sensa- 
tion in your throat, to put up a little prayer and 
make an earnest promise. 

Perhaps you have been a trifle wild and 
reckless. It won't do now. Tom. There is 
a pair of little feet hidden away in those warm 
blankets that in two or three years will begin 
to toddle in your footsteps, and you had better 
begin to walk in a straight path, Tom. 

If you should ever live to see that baby a 
grown man in whom all your little peccadilloes 
had been magnified into full-grown and brutal 
vices, you would look back to this day as the 
bitterest of your life. Turn over a new leaf, 
Tom. Be such a man that to the last day of 
his existence the proudest thing this little boy 
can do, will be to point to you (or your mem- 
ory) and say, " He was my father." 

And as for the mother, she is too weak to 
listen to a long homily on this most eventful 
morning that ever dawned upon the world. 
But every one is sending congratulations, and 
I must send mine. You never knew before, 



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107 



did you, what unutterable emotion of gladness 
could swell in a human heart ? 

I can give you no better wish than that every 
plan you are making now for the welfare of this 
little pilgrim in his long journey may be fulfilled. 
For these new moments of responsibility are 
moments of self-renunciation. Here are needs 
before which your desires vanish. Be all that 
you are vowing in the shrine of your glad 
young heart that you will be. Remember 
b ' ; The child is father to the man.'' Don't for- 
get that if you '''train up a child in the way 
that he should go, when he is old he will not 
depart from it." 

"A sunshine broken in the rill, 
Though turned astray, is sunshine still." 

But it is not so with a little child i When it 
is turned astray it is no longer a sunbeam, but 
a dark and wavering shadow. 

And as for the little child itself, as soon as 
it can comprehend, teach it this verse from a 
Persian song : 

" On parent knees, a naked, new-born child 
Weeping thou sat'st. while all around thee smiled; 
So live, that sinking in thy last long sleep. 
Calm thou may'st smile, while all around thee 
weep." 



108 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXX. 



HIS afternoon, when you are sitting in the 



x grateful shade of the grand stand of the 
ball field, follow with your thoughts the foul 
tip that goes scooting over the tin roof into the 
open street. 

A hundred ragged gamins haunt that street, 
shifting here and there like little tadpoles in a 
pond. They are of all shapes, descriptions 
and colors, some being short and fat, and 
others lean and tall, some black, some white, 
and some both black and white ; some limping 
on crutches, and others bounding like young 
deers, all being ragged and dirty — Falstaff's 
army in miniature. 

"You would think that I had a hundred 
and fifty prodigals lately come from swine- 
keeping, and eating chaff and husks. 
There 's but a shirt and a half in all my com- 
pany, and the half shirt is two napkins tacked 
together and thrown over the shoulders like a 
herald's coat without sleeves." 
■ But beneath those shirts beat eager hearts, 
capable of all life's hopes and fears, joys and 
sorrows, aspirations and despairs. 

That hundred pairs of eyes — some like lit- 




THE OPTIMIST. 



109 



tie ferrets, others like young eagles or even- 
ing stars, and some like little peeled onions or 
holes punctured in yellow parchment — are riv- 
eted upon some favorite spot on the tin roof, 
or roam along its edge as if it were the horizon 
of a universe. 

They are watching for that foul tip which 
you indifferently saw scoot over the building. 
To you it was a leather ball — to them a key to 
paradise, for it is the talisman which, upon its 
presentation to the fierce-eyed Peter at the 
gate, unlocks for them that world of glory 
whose 4 shouts of excitement and roars of 
laughter have floated out upon their eager ears 
like Elysian music far away and sweet. 

It comes ! "What a wild plunge ! What a 
mad scramble ! Like a pack of wolves they 
howl and fight, until at last, more cunning 
than the rest, or stronger, or luckier, perhaps, 
the favored child of fortune having seized the 
ball approaches the sacred gate and vanishes 
into the mysterious inclosure, leaving his com- 
panions to envy his happiness and to begin 
again their weary watching and their patient 
waiting. 

It is indeed a world in miniature ! 

So stand the masses of mankind, listening 
to the plaudits of the favored few who have 
entered the gates, and taken their seats on 



110 



THE OPTIMIST. 



the grand stand, to watch the great game that 
is being played in the inclosure. 

Now and then the ball of fortune — some 
lucky chance, some golden opportunity, flies 
into the air, and the wild struggle for the 
place, the title, the fame, the fortune begins, 
and the victor vanishes into that charmed circle 
which huzzas within. 

In the fence there is not even a peep hole. 
Every opening is barred. 

The pathos of the spectacle lies in the fact 
that there are so many more people than there 
are "foul tips," and the prizes seem to go 
much more by accident than by award or dis- 
tribution. 

It must be a hard thing for the little gamin, 
weak of knee and slow of pulse, who goes to 
the ballground every day for years, and always 
hopes and always struggles and always fails ! 

He will lose heart sometime and go no more 
and hope no more and struggle no more. 

The next time we go to the park let us carry 
an extra "seventy-five cents" and pick out 
some little fellow who has a "game leg'" or 
the "'rickets" and take him in with us to 
the grand stand. Let us give him one long 
look at the great spectacle. Let us give him 
a cushion, a score card and a glass of lemon- 
ade — give the poor little chap one chance in 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Ill 



his life to see the great and only "Buck 
Ewing !" 

He will remember it when he is old and 
gray, and we shall get more pleasure out of his 
deep joy than from the game itself. 



112 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXXI. 



ROM the Mississippi to the Pacific, from 



A British America to Mexico, the word 
" cinch" is in every mouth. 

To get a ''cinch" on somebody, or some 
opportunity, is the universal ambition. 

" I have got a cinch, a dead, mortal cinch!" 
Such is the cry of triumph that some time or 



climbed into the saddle. After he had gone 
a few rods, he turned a corner sharply, and the 
saddle and I rolled off. He had inflated his 
abdomen with air by a gentle inhalation just as 
I fastened the girth. 

At length I encounted his guile with craft. 
Upon the instant when I tied the knot I drove 





other goes up from 
the lips of every 
fortune hunter in 
the wild and woolly 



West. 



I had an Indian 
pony by the name 
of Tiny. Before I 
had comprehended 
his subtlety I tight- 
ened the cinch and 



THE OPTIMIST. 



113 



my knee violently into the distended stomach. 
The collapse reduced him to his normal di- 
mensions and made the '-'dead, mortal cinch" 
possible. He exchanged the smile with which 
he greeted my misfortune for a sigh, with 
which he acknowledged his own. 

Of the millions of people who are looking 
for " cinches" in this life, who finds them? 

Nature has a way of inflating herself just as 
we tie the knot, and exhausting, just as we 
climb into the saddle. No one has ever yet 
found such a trick for her, as I played upon my 
pony. 

"I have got a cinch on the sea," says the 
sailor, and suddenly his boat goes down. "I 
have got a cinch on fruit raising," says the 
farmer, and the frost nips his blossoms. "I 
have got a cinch on the market," says the 
speculator, and a panic strikes him. 

"I have got a cinch on the world," said 
Caesar, and on the instant the knife of Brutus 
touched his heart. 

If any one ever had a cinch, it is William 
McKinley; but who knows whether the politi- 
cal horse may not be inflated, and ready to ex- 
haust at St. Louis? 

No, it is in harmony with eternal nature that 
it should be impossible for man to get a cinch 
on nature. He must never be so firmly seated 
in the saddle that he can not be thrown. 



114 



THE OPTIMIST. 



You complain of the uncertainties and vicis- 
situdes of life. You fret because you can not 
master the forces which you have to employ. 
But if you could, you would abuse your power. 
You would secure privileges which you would 
never surrender, and prerogatives which you 
would never renounce. 

If nature suddenly throws you out of the 
saddle in which you had been riding on some 
weak person's neck, you must remember that 
it is by the same method that she prevents 
some stronger man from riding yours. 

I can excuse her for the grim smile upon her 
face when she turns her sharp corners and 
tumbles out of their comfortable saddles the 
Kings and the Barons and the Philosophers 
who have been comfortably seated upon the 
shoulders of the sweating masses. 

It begins to seem to the Plutocrats, no 
doubt, as if they had tied the girth more 
tightly than the Aristocrats, but some fine day 
they will find themselves in the dust of the 
great highway of civilization, wondering what 
was the matter with their cinch. 

No, there are no absolute certainties in life. 
There are no "dead, mortal cinches. " No 
matter what horse we are riding, our saddles 
are liable to come off. 

And this very element of insecurity is one 
of the charms of life. How many active 



THE OPTIMIST. 



115 



riders would now be sleeping in their saddles, 
if it were not for that slippery cinch ! 

But there is one thing that a brave man can 
always do. He can tighten his cinch and 
mount again ! 

Have you lost your seat in the panic? 
Don't be discouraged. You have plenty of 
company. Catch your horse, fling your sad- 
dle over his back, tighten your cinch, and 
mount again. 



116 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXXII. 



ITTLE Simpkins rushed upstairs two steps 



at a time, bounded into his employer's 
office, and exclaimed, in the wildest excite- 
ment : " Those fellows down there are 1 doing 
me dirt.' I can't stand it. What '11 I do?" 

The rosy-faced old man stroked Simpkins's 
bristling little back, and said to him : " Keep 
sweet, Simpkins ; keep sweet ! " 

Keep sweet to-day, my friend, and pass this 
message along. 

There is much in life to embitter us. We 
are misunderstood and deceived by our friends, 
abused and betrayed by our enemies. Not a 
day goes by, without its friction and irritation. 
The world is full of meanness and littleness. 
No matter; keep sweet. 
Do sour things taste any sweeter for being 
eaten by a sour mouth ? If you had to take 
a dose of wormwood, would you smear your 
tongue with aloes ? There is no man in the 
world so vulnerable to every dart as the man 
whose heart is full of bitterness. 

When I used to " catch behind the bat," in 
the early days of baseball, we had no protect- 
ors, whatever, and took curved balls, short 




THE OPTIMIST. 



117 



bounds, and foul tips on our shins and in our 
stomachs, or with our noses, eyes, or mouths. 

In these better days the catchers wear gloves, 
masks, and pads. 

The man who c< keeps sweet " wears mittens, 
masks, and pads. The foul tips and inshoots 
of misfortune can not hurt him. A sweet 
temper and a sunny face will turn the edge of 
the sharpest word. 

You are going down to the store to-day. to 
come into the closest possible contact with a 
fellow (I know him well) whose very appear- 
ance would curdle fresh milk, roil the water 
of a jasper sea, and set the teeth of a nursing 
baby on edge. You say that the only way in 
which you can stand him at all is " to get good 
and mad "* at the very outset, and stay so all 
day, just as you endure a dentist, by screwing 
your face all up, gripping his elbow with your 
hands and kicking at the footrest. 

Well, that is one way. But there is another. 
Keep sweet. If you have a burden to carry, 
you do not fit yourself to carry it by cutting all 
the sinews in your back. But this is what you 
do when you try to bear your burden by get- 
ting angry. Every thing goes wrong with an 
angry man. The gods are sharp ! They wish 
to destroy you, and so they make you mad. 
Beware of the gods ! 

Probably you got out of bed on the wrong 



118 



THE OPTIMIST. 



side this morning, and Bridget forgot to set 
the buckwheat cakes last night, and the baby 
pulled your poached egg over into your lap at 
breakfast and spoiled your new tailor-made 
trousers, and you are boiling inside like a tea 
kettle. Nice breakfast you are having, are n't 
you ? Pretty frame of mind this is for begin- 
ning the day, going away angry and leaving 
Mary sobbing at the front door and begging in 
vain for a kiss. 

Well, well, John ! Who would have believed 
that sweet temper of yours could be ruined as 
soon as this ! I remember well the day that 
you were married, when every body said that 
" Mary had caught a stray sunbeam ! " And 
now all the old girls are shrugging their shoul- 
ders, and whispering : " Close call we had! " 

' 'Come, now, don't fret at Mary because 
she did not sweeten your coffee. The sugar is 
right there by you. And, by the way, drop a 
lump or two into that embittered heart of 
yours ! 

Keep sweet to-day. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



119 



XXXIII. 

ii QTHERS shall sing the song; 
Others shall right the wrong, 
Finish what I begin 
And what I fail of win! 
What matter — I or thev ? 
Mine or another day ? 
So the right word be said 
And life the better made.'' 

To multitudes of people these words will 
seem the merest twaddle. They never strove 
to sing a song that should fall like Longfellow's 
arrow into the heart of a friend ! They never 
struggled to right a wrong, like Whittier's " Re- 
former : " 

"All grim and soiled and brown with tan 
I saw a Strong One, in his wrath 
Smiting the godless shrines of man 
Along his path." 

To other multitudes who have really striven 
to bind up broken hearts and set captives at 
liberty, only to meet with repulse and failure, 
they will seem like a fragment of an angelic 
hymn of consolation, wafted out of the vast 
void around them. 

These were the favorite lines of a gifted and 
noble woman, who, while I write, lies in a quiet 



120 



THE OPTIMIST. 



chamber through whose open window the 
breezes are wafting the odors of the lilac buds 
and the songs of the robins. 

Her hands, empty for the first time since 
childhood, are folded across her breast. 

That heart which ceased to beat for herself 
long years ago. has ceased to beat at all. The 
smile, which it cost her in her life so many 
heroic struggles to wear, sleeps upon her silent 
lips like a dream of beauty. 

She sang many songs whose echoes died 
away without response. She strove often, and 
bravely, only to know many repulses and 
defeats. 

But there burned in her soul the unquench- 
able faith that all she did and all she suffered, 
was to work out for herself a far more unceas- 
ing and eternal weight of glory, and to be a 
brief but indispensable note in the harmony 
of the song of a redeemed humanity. 

While the avaricious and the base are spoil- 
ing mankind like the Philistines of old — in 
every hamlet and in every square, these patient, 
loving, gentle souls are sacrificing themselves 
for others. 

"She never thinks of herself,'' said a father 
to me the other day while speaking of his 
daughter. "She has reversed the order of 
nature, and ' mothers ' her own mother in her 
sickness as if she were a baby." 



THE OPTIMIST. 



121 



They do not ask for rewards. They do not 
look for results. They sing their songs and 
strike their blows and pass on, as a sower flings 
his seed into the soil, and goes home to his 
evening supper and repose. 

How pitiful it makes our repining at the 
fruitlessness of life's endeavor seem ! 

For this one day let us trample upon that 
deadly thought that the universe is a vast 
machine constructed to grind out happiness for 
our little mouths to suck — (like a midget which 
thinks all the cattle in a pasture exist to distill 
one infinitesimal drop of milk for his little pro- 
boscis) ! 

There is an egotism and self-love in this age 
of luxury that becomes positively infernal. 

For this one day (it is only a few hours long) 
let us put the gnawing thought of our own per- 
sonal happiness and success, out of sight. 

Let us do our work as a little child plays his 
game, and when it is finished, rest. 

The best we do is metamorphosed — suffers 
"a sea change into something new and 
strange." 

It is our worst that springs up into full view 
to curse us. 

"Twice I did well and heard of it never; 
Once I did evil and heard of it ever." 



122 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXXIV. 

TOURING one of the hottest battles of the 
civil war, three soldiers found themselves 
exposed to a terrible fusillade. 

They flung themselves behind an old log, 
and listened to the hornet-like hum of the 
bullets as they sped through the air, or to 
their thuds as they buried themselves in the 
trees. 

The first of these men was a philosopher, 




who observed, the second a wag who joked, 
and the third a coward who trembled. 

As the coward's fear increased to terror, the 
wag cut a switch from an overhanging branch, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



123 



fastened a pin in the end of it, and when the 
next crash of the muskets was heard, drove it 
sharply into the back of the shivering pol- 
troon. He gave a wild yell, sprang into the 
air, and fell back dead ! 

The wag stopped laughing, and the philos- 
opher reflected. 

" Most of our troubles are purely imaginary, *' 
said he. And he was right. 

When we bestow a passing thought upon the 
misery which the mere anticipation of danger 
and sorrow causes in this world, we are tempted 
to despise or condemn the author of a system 
in which the imagination so horribly increases 
the fund of our real and necessary suffering. 

But that passing thought is superficial and 
unphilosophical. For if it were not for that 
swift and sustained dread of yet unrealized 
peril (which is, indeed, a source of pain), the 
deadly perils themselves would fall upon us 
unforeseen, like lightning from a clear sky. 

Measure then, honestly and fairly, the pro- 
tective power of that pain-producing and ever- 
present dread of the unreal ! 

The beautiful doe who leads her spotted 
fawn through the wilderness to the " salt 
lick,'" starts, trembles and endures immeasure- 
able suffering at a hundred imaginary dangers 
for every one that is real. But if she did not 
thus suffer, and if she plodded on stupidly 



124 



THE OPTIMIST. 



until after the wild-cat's leap, her pain would 
be irremediable. 

It is this perpetual anticipation, this ap- 
parently superfluous agony of the imagination 
which alone makes the survival of life pos- 
sible. 

It is because the mother trembles for her 
babe, the maiden for her virtue, the man for 
his honor, the merchant for his goods, the 
farmer for his crops, the invalid for his health, 
the patriot for liberty and the Christian for 
his faith — even at the presence of imaginary 
danger — that civilization survives. 

" Experience," said Coleridge, " is like the 
stern light of a vessel. It lights up only the 
path which we have already traveled." 

It is this instinctive and imaginary fear of 
the unreal, that lights up the pathway over 
which we have yet to go. 

But we have not yet fathomed this deep 
theme. 

Great, necessary, beneficial as that gift of 
the Creator is — its possession and abuse be- 
come the source of wretchedness for which we 
all deserve to be despised. 

We distort, instead of cultivating, this divine 
instinct, and it becomes abnormally sensitive. 
When it becomes morbid, hope and peace 
depart. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



125 



Where is the man whose troubles are not a 
thousand times more imaginary than real ? 

To the vast masses of worrying creatures 
who compose this human race, the prick of a 
pin is as deadly as the crash of a bullet, and 
all because of a morbid imagination. 

There is poor little Mrs. Pinchface making 
herself miserable from morning until night over 
the snubs and slights which she fancies people 
are putting upon her, and here comes Mr. 
Shudder Daily, who has not enjoyed a peace- 
ful sleep for three thousand six hundred 
and fifty nights for fear he will end his days in 
the poor-house. 

The evils which come to us are to those 
we anticipate, as one to a hundred. 

If we only suffered the real pains, life would 
not be so hard. 

It is the deadly pin prick that kills. 

Wait until your bullet really hits you before 
you spring into the air with a yell. 

Come, now, you are not so badly off, are 
you ? If there were no to-morrow you could 
be happy to-day. Perhaps there will not be ! 
At all events, "sufficient unto the day is the 
evil thereof." 



126 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXXV. 

OMINICK O'GRADY, the murderer, lay 



' upon his cot in the court-room, helplessly 
and hopelessly demented. 

Judge, jury, counselors and spectators looked 
upon him with pity and with horror. 

"First," said the physician in the witness 
box, "he tried to commit physical suicide. 

" Failing in this, he attempted mental and 
moral suicide ! He refused to eat, he refused 
to talk, he refused to perform any of those 
functions in the discharge of which our true 
humanity consists. There is a definite line 
between sanity and insanity. He deliberately 
and voluntarily forced himself over that line !" 

At these words, a hush stole over the assem- 
bly. "He forced himself over the line." 
"He forced himself over the line." The 
words kept ringing in our ears. 
Such is the responsibility of man ! 
A fixed and definite line is drawn around 
us, inside of which we may safely move. 
When we pass it we enter the domain of the 
abnormal and the fatal. That line is not al- 
ways visible, and is all the more dreadful be- 
cause it runs through shadows. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



127 



But although it is hidden, it is always there. 

There is a line between health and disease, 
and many of us are voluntarily pushing our- 
selves over it. Once upon the other side, 
forces will seize us, over which we have no 
control. 

There is a line between virtue and vice. 

Over that line we are dragged by resistless 
powers. We force ourselves across it ! It 
is when we are upon the other side that the 
resistless powers seize us. It is like passing 
that line in the Niagara river above the falls, 
on one side of which your destiny is in your 
own hands, but on the other it is in the power 
of the cruel, the remorseless, the irresistible 
river ! 

There comes a dreadful moment in the ex- 
perience of every one who forces himself 
over the line, when he feels the clasp of the 
mighty hands, the pull of the downward stream 
of influences, against which he struggles in 
vain. 

It is this involuntary element in the tragedy 
that lends it sublimity. 

We regarded that hump beneath the blank- 
ets of his cot, from which the very sem- 
blance of humanity had almost vanished, with 
loathing and disgust, until the trained expert 
shot that ray of light upon the moral problem : 
" He forced himself over the line." 



128 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Among the thousands who read the columns 
of The Tribune this morning, there will be 
some who are treading dangerously near the 
line. 

It is not too late to turn back now, but one 
more step, and, like Dominick O'Grady, you 
will be upon the other side. 

What could help him ? Law, science, re- 
ligion, society, all the enginery of modern 
life for uplifting humanity were powerless after 
he had forced himself across the line. 

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten 
this little hand," said Lady Macbeth, after she 
had forced herself over the line. 



THE OPTIMIST, 



129 



XXXVI. 



HERE is at least one optimist's corner in 



every happy home. 
Sometimes a cradle stands within it, and a 
little baby enthroned amidst its downy pillows 
casts a magic spell over all the troubled hearts 
that bring their burdens into its presence. 

Sometimes it is occupied by a cot on which 
reposes a body racked with pain, but inhabited 
by an indomitable spirit, which, like an al- 
chemist, transmutes the coarsest materials of 
household life to words and smiles of lustrous 
gold. 

Sometimes it is sanctified by the presence 
of an old grandmother, seated in her arm- 
chair, and diffusing an influence through the 
domestic circle that shines like the lamp on 
the mantel and warms like the fire in the 
hearth. 

For three years there was such a corner in 
my boyhood home. If there was a frown in 
that dear old face in all that time, I never saw 
it. If a harsh word fell from those lips, I 
never heard it. I have seen tears in those 
mild, blue eyes, but when they fell they gave 




130 



THE OPTIMIST. 



life to the flowers in our hearts like April 
showers in a garden. 

For uncounted hours those old fingers plied 
the knitting needles, while the thoughts wan- 
dered back into the dear, dead past on the 
feet of memory, or floated into the longed-for 
future on the wings of faith. Much of the 
time a Bible lay open upon her lap. and she 
lowered her spectacles from her forehead to 
gaze long and lovingly upon some favorite 
verse which would kindle a smile upon her 
lips. 

Often the Bible gave way to the almanac, 
from whose pages she learned many a recipe 
for healing wounds, or baking cakes, and 
many a wise old saw and many a funny joke. 
Hard questions were brought to the wise head 
for solutions. Quarrels came to that just judge 
for arbitration, and wounded feelings to that 
loving heart for sympathy. She exalted old 
age into a beatitude, and in her presence 
young maidens wished that they were withered 
and gray. 

Her influence was a formative force in my 
expanding life, and convinced me that at no 
period in our existence can we have a deeper 
and more lasting power to affect spirit than 
when we have become too infirm to mold 
matter. But the one prime essential in that 
power is a calm and settled hopefulness. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



131 



A despairing old man or woman alienates, 
repels, and petrifies youth. Pessimism ren- 
ders the two extremes of life antipathetic. 
Old age shivers at the laughter of youth, and 
youth shudders at the tears of old age. 

Perhaps this little essay will fall under the 
eyes of some of the old people who have been 
" shelved' 5 by the ruthless hand of time. 
Seated there in your corner, let it persuade 
you to review the influence you are exerting 
on the few lives which come in contact with 
your own. If you think yourselves wronged or 
neglected, if you cherish dark thoughts in 
your bosom, you will do more harm in your 
last few years than you have done good in all 
the rest. Such is the stern law of nature, and 
it can not be evaded. 

Be brave, be cheerful, be sweet. If it is 
harder for you than it is for us, you at least 
have shorter time to endure the struggle. 

Are Edmund Waller's words true of you? 

" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. 
Lets in new light through chinks which time has 
made. 

Stronger by weakness wiser men become. 
As they draw near to their eternal home." 

How is it ? Does 

"The sunset of life give you mystical lore. 
And do coming events cast their shadows be- 
fore ? " 



132 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XXXVIL 

UTI 7HY 3 I could not live a blessed day 
* * without an ' eye-opener ' in the morn- 
nig and a ' night-cap ' at bed time/ 3 said Major 
Jim. in astonishment. 

I admit that everybody needs an '•eye- 
opener'''' and a "night-cap;" but of what 
shall they consist ? 

It is a hard thing for any of us who toil 
manfully in the struggle of life to pull our- 
selves together in the morning and get wide 
awake for the duties that lie before us. for 
somehow the fatigue of yesterday will lap 
over just a little bit into to-day, and it is 
the whittling off of this small fraction of 
unrecovered strength that makes us prema- 
turely old and gray. 

Nor is it any easier at night to compose the 
agitated mind and quivering nerves, when we 
lie down upon that couch where we have so 
often vainly courted sleep. 

It is no wonder that it is an almost universal 
craving — this desire for something to arouse us 
in the morning and quiet us at night. But the 
old "eye-opener'' and " night-cap " have so 
often turned into the penny that has weighted 



THE OPTIMIST. 



133 



down the closed lid and the shroud that has 
clothed the frozen limbs of the inebriate, that 
I rise to propose a substitute. 

I foresee the amused and condescending 
smile that will play over the lips of the many 
Major Jims whose tongues are already water- 
ing at the thought of some favorite cordial. 
But they can neither laugh nor frown me down. 

I propose a passage from the Bible as an 
"eye-opener'"' in the morning, and one from 
Shakespeare as a "night- cap"' in the evening. 

Laugh, if you will, but what you need is a 
moral tonic when you start down town to cope 
with the problems of your busy day. You need 
to remember that you are a man ; that your 
life is worthless without honor ; that there 
rests upon your shoulders an eternal weight 
of responsibility ; that you must give an ac- 
count of the deeds done in the body, when 
at last you stand before the bar of God. 
There is nothing else in the world that will so 
stir the mind and rouse and stimulate the 
sluggish body as a vivid shock, communicated 
to the soul by this awful consciousness of the 
dignity and grandeur of a human life. Throw 
your toddy out of the window ! Open your 
Bible to Timothy II, 4-7. and read these re- 
sounding words : 

"I have fought a good fight: I have 
.finished my course: I have kept the faith. 



134 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 
righteousness which the Lord, the righteous 
judge, shall give me at that day.*' 

Let me tell you that a man filled and thrilled 
with those words can do ten times the work 
and bear ten times the trouble, of one whose 
veins burn with the fires of a glass of old rye ! 

Truth pours tides of strength into the phy- 
sical nature through the moral ; but alcohol 
weakens and relaxes the force and power of 
the soul, as every tippler knows. 

And then at evening time, tired, depressed 
and nervous, stir your slumbering fancy, rouse 
your drooping imagination, quicken your per- 
ceptions of the beautiful, by reading an essay 
from Emerson, a few stanzas from Browning 
or an act from Shakespeare. Turn your mind 
out of its old channels of thought. Acquire 
the power of mental deflection. Forget the 
grind, the care of daily life, in the glorious 
dreams of the poets, Laugh at the story 
of old Jack Falstaff, the "'man of continual 
dissolution and thaw . . . more than half 
stewed in grease like a Dutch dish . 
thrown in the Thames and cooled, glowing hot 
in that surge like a horseshoe." 

It is the mind that needs an ci eye-opener " 
and a " night-cap " far more than the body. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



135 



XXXVIII. 



WO men were standing in the front part 



^ of a "general notion " store in a frontier 
town in Texas. 

They were talking pleasantly and openly 
until one of them inadvertently dropped a 
remark which was capable of a double con- 
struction. 

A leer crept over the face of his companion. 

"Reminds me of a story/' he said, and 
looking stealthily around, he asked under his 
breath, "Are there any ladies here ? " 

" You need not tell me any story which you 
would not tell if there were/ 3 said the tall 
young fellow whom he addressed, straightening 
himself to his full height and turning on his 



I saw that with my own eyes, and heard it 
with my own ears, and so did my friend Dob- 
son. "Makes me feel like a man who had 
been down in a coal mine or the bottom of the 
sea, and just come up into God's free air and 
sunlight," said he. 

" I have lived long enough to know,"' he 
continued, "that smut will ruin a man's soul 
sooner than profanity. There is nothing said 




heel. 



136 



THE OPTIMIST. 



against it in the Decalogue, to be sure, but if I 
were going to add one more precept to that 
venerable code, it would be, ' Thou shalt not 
tell an unclean story or smile at a vulgar joke.' 
I have not listened to one for twenty years, 
and so long as I have heels to turn upon like 
that young fellow, or hands to put over my 
ears, I never expect to hear another, for I 
loathe them as a mad dog does water." 

The fact of the matter is, that no vice bears 
within its bosom the seeds of a more certain 
and deadly punishment than impure story 
telling, for it results, sooner or later, in an 
utter perversion of that capacity of our soul 
by which we appreciate and reverence the 
most beautiful and sacred mystery of life — the 
mystery of sex. 

We come into existence with one pair of eyes 
and begin at once to make another. Through 
those of our own manufacture we shall ever 
more be condemned to gaze upon the objects 
which surround us. 

We slowly make them out of our daily 
thoughts. There is no escape from the uni- 
versal law that the man who thinks dark 
thoughts will see a dark and somber world. 
Whoever broods over injustice and meditates 
revenge will see on every hand treachery and 
wrong. The man who dreams forever of 
wealth may not acquire the finger of Midas by 



THE OPTIMIST. 



137 



which he can turn the objects which he touches 
into gold, but he is doomed inexorably to see 
them tinged with its color. 

If there is any thing more sure than this in 
all the world, it is that a man who opens his 
ears to vulgar jokes is not only doomed, but 
damned, to lose sight forever more of the holiest 
and sweetest and purest element of life, and 
over the faces and forms of men and women 
and children to see creeping, foul visions, as 
the victim of the mania-a-potu sees snakes and 
lizards crawling over every object on which he 
fixes his gaze. 

When a man has groveled his way down 
into the slavery of a mental habit, by which 
any one of twenty of the most holy words in 
human language will summon a flock of nasty 
jokes and filthy stories out of his memory, as 
the presence of carrion will fetch the worms 
out of the ground, he has gotten to the bottom 
of the bottomless pit. Beyond it degradation 
does not go. 

The man who gains but a poor and partial 
victory over the imaginations of his brain may 
indeed deserve our pity; but he who does not 
wholly subdue his conversation to the ideal law 
of purity deserves contempt. 

There is only one way in which to be able 
to see men clothed in the true dignity of man- 
hood, and women robed in the regal beauty 



138 



THE OPTIMIST. 



and the divine loveliness of womanhood, and 
that is with a pure mind, and he who misses 
this vision, misses all. 

Let us hold up our right hands and swear 
that we will never let any one tell us a story 
that we would not listen to in the presence of 
our mothers, wives, and sweethearts. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



139 



XXXIX. 



HE good Doctor, who had been conscien- 



A tiously devoting himself to the children 
of other people during a long, hard year, came 
up to the country for his vacation. 

" I am going to become acquainted with my 
own family," he said. "I am going to be a 
boy with my boys." 

It was a large contract, for, although a man 
at fifty is not old, he is not a spring chicken. 

It naturally seems to a man who is a man 
among men as if it were easy enough to be 
a boy among boys — until he tries it. 

They led him a chase, those three lads of 
nine, eleven and thirteen. He was not super- 
stitious about the number thirteen when he first 
came • but now he is, and not only about thir- 
teen, but about eleveruand nine also. 
His first test was one of endurance. 
He started in with them at 8:30 in the morn- 
ing, to gather butterflies and birds' nests. At 
11 they were just getting a good start; but 
he was lying flat on his back under the 
shade of an apple tree too tired even to eat. 
After dinner he flung himself upon a couch, 
and it was 3 o'clock before he opened his 




140 



THE OPTIMIST. 



first eye, and 3:30 when the lid of the second 
slowly lifted. 

The little " Doctors" were ready for him, 
and they started for a bicycle ride. At 6 
o'clock the procession appeared, with the 
" Old Man " bringing up the rear, travel-worn, 
long-faced and scarcely able to push his wheel 
up the driveway to the side door. 

The youngsters begged him to go out with 
them after supper to masquerade with long white 
robes and a pumpkin lantern ; but he winked be- 
seechingly to his wife, and said : "I have some 
work to do up-stairs, boys, which can not be 
postponed; but I will be with you to-morrow." 
His wife followed him up to the chamber, and 
he explained. '"'I hope I may be forgiven, 
but that very difficult and imperative ' work ' 
was getting into bed." With her assistance 
and the use of a bottle of witch-hazel, he suc- 
ceeded. It was the first of a long list of pre- 
varications. 

In the morning he crawled out of bed, stiff 
and sore, but full of grit. 

They told him they were going to fish a trout 
stream four miles away. He gasped and asked 
them if it could be reached by a buggy drive. 
"Oh, no," they said ; "It is over that range 
of hills." He looked, sighed, started, and 
came home at night, a mere shadow of himself. 
" Half-cooked brook trout, roasted field corn, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



141 



hard-boiled eggs and green apples have pro- 
duced a slight indisposition," he said to the 
landlady, with a sickly smile, as he sidled past 
the supper table to the bedroom. 

But the climax came the next day, when 
the young hopefuls invited him to a game of 
" ; mumblety-peg," or " mumbie-the-peg," or 
however it may be spelled. 

He was pretty stiff for squatting down like a 
Turk, and his knees snapped as he did so. 
" Once down, never up," he muttered under 
his breath. 

The knife went round, each little Doctor 
scoring several points in turn. It reached 
' 'the old man." He failed once, twice, three 
times — ten — then vowed the butt end was 
loaded, and tried his own. 

There could be only one denouement. 
" Pop 's got to pull the peg," screamed little 
Bill, dancing like a wild Indian, and rushing 
into the house to call the boarders. They 
came, gathered round in a circle, watched the 
delighted Jim sharpen the peg, submit to the 
blindfold bandage, and with ten carefully de- 
livered blows drive that short peg out of sight. 

The "Patriarch" (the antediluvian," as 
he called himself privately to his wife) took 
off his coat, put his spectacles in their case, 
adjusted his false teeth, kneeled down and 
thrust his muzzle pegward. He gnawed, he 



142 



THE OPTIMIST. 



bit, he dug, and rose for breath looking more 
like a razor-backed hog than an elegant city 
doctor. 

" Boys/' he said humbly, " can I dig a hole 
for my nose?" Little Bill said "No," but 
Jim and Tom assented. 

" Down he went again, and after five min- 
utes he came up with the peg, but a porcelain 
tooth was gone ! 

"Rooting for the Reds didn't help you 
much in rooting for pegs, did it, Pop ?" screamed 
the irreverent son of a well-known Cincin- 
nati base-ball crank. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



143 



XL. 



HE little lamplighter came zig-zagging 



A down Burnet avenue. The gas jets 
popped into flame, first upon one side of the 
street and then upon the other, as he pursued 
his Godlike mission. 

"How do you like your job?" I asked, as 
he trudged along , 



job be worse than 

another when the lamps are all of the same 
height and equally far apart ?" I inquired. 

" Oh, but they give us all the ' run-backs, ' " 
he replied. 

"And what in the world is a 'run-back?'" 
"Why," said the boy, "they are little, short 




' ' They always 
give the meanest 
jobs to the littlest 
fellows," he an- 
swered. 



with his ladder over 
his shoulder and his 
torch in his hand, a 
Prometheus in em- 
bryo. 



"How can one 




144 



THE OPTIMIST. 



side streets, down which we have to go and 
run back, with nothing to do on the return 
trip." 

6 4 Little man," said I, u do n't commence to 
kick about having all the hard jobs and 'run- 
backs ' before you are out of your knicker- 
bockers. The longer you live the more ' run- 
backs ' you will have. There is not a job 
in the whole wide world which is n't full of 
them." 

"Why, there is the mayor, now. He don't 
have any." 

" Don't he ?" I replied. " I reckon by the 
time he gets through with all his work and the 
office seekers, and creeps off to bed, he thinks 
the whole job is a 'run-back.'" 

"Well, how about a preacher?" he insinu- 
ated. 

" Let that pass, my boy," I answered. " I 
would rather you thought I had no troubles 
than to have you remember me as complaining 
about them. But just lean your ladder against 
that lamp-post and sit on the third round, so 
that your head will be on a level with mine. 
There, that is good. Now, listen. 

"There are drawbacks in every career. 
You call them 'run-backs.' It is all the same. 
All along the pathway of life there are toll- 
gates, where the travelers have to pay a frac- 
tion of their time, their strength, their money, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



145 



their very life, for the privilege of continuing 
on their journeys. 

"Those who travel over one road never see 
the toll-gates on the other, and the mean ones 
are forever fretting and stewing because they 
have to pay so much more than any one else. 
It is bad enough to hear an old man moaning 
over the drawbacks of his life, but it is intol- 
erable to hear it from a little boy. If you 
want to make every one despise you, just keep 
repeating this complaint you have made to me. 

"If you want everybody to love and honor 
you— yes, if you want to achieve success — 
take your 'run-backs' without a murmur. 

" When the good God gives us our medicine 
there is always a little bitter with the sweet, 
and we must not always be making wry faces 
over it. 

"Keep your torch full of oil, light every 
gas-lamp on your route, whistle merrily while 
you make your 'run-backs,' carry your wages 
home to your mother, be a good boy, and 
you 11 be a noble man. Good-night." 



146 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XLI. 



REMBLING, anxious, and harried, poor 



A Dobson stood by the desk, and said : 
6 ' Give me another chance, for God's sake ! I 
am working night and day. The times are 
hard. Be merciful ! " 

Hobson's face hardened. A gleam like that 
from a sword flashed from his eyes. "Busi- 
ness is business," he answered, and his jaws 
shut like a steel trap. 

Yes, business is business ! Just as gravity is 
gravity; fire, fire; and lightning, lightning. 

But gravity is for floating birds and vessels, 
as well as dragging people over precipices- 
fire is for baking bread, and roasting meat, as 
well as burning houses ; electricity is for light- 
ing cities and running street cars, as well as 
for splitting mountains! 

If there is an element of mercy and helpful- 
ness in gravity, fire, and lightning, surely there 
may also be in business ! " 

"Business is business," is a phrase which, 
in a different sense from "charity," "covers a 
multitude of sins." 

I know how inexorable the laws of business 
are. You must get more than you pay. You 




THE OPTIMIST. 



147 



must demand an equivalent of service for 
wages. You must not buy what you can not 
sell. You must compete successfully, or be 
crushed mercilessly. Such, and a thousand 
other stern and unutterable principles, stalk 
like pitiless policemen up and down the streets 
where human beings toil and sweat. 

Poetry, romance, sentiment, imagination, 
will no more create wealth or prevent failure 
in the mart of trade than they will create a 
tidal wave or stop a flood. 

But a merchant who does not temper his 
business judgment with mercy is a devil, and 
not a man. If there is any place on earth 
where " mercy and truth should meet together 
and righteousness and peace should kiss each 
other," 'tis in the counting-room. 

Hobson, do you know how long before you 
will stand in Dobson's shoes ? Even while 
you read, your coal barge may be burning on 
the Ohio, your ships sinking in the sea like 
the Argosy of Antonio, your workmen strik- 
ing, your cashier defaulting, your rivals plot- 
ting ! 

You had better tell Dobson to sit down a 
moment, while you retire to your private room 
and put up that little prayer your mother 
taught you — 

"That mercy I to others show 
That mercy show to me." 



148 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Hobson, the trouble with you is, that you 
think that "success" is the one criterion of 
manhood, and justification of conduct. Let me 
tell you that sometimes failure is a supreme 
duty ! What right have you to crush poor 
Dobson ? Do you owe him nothing because 
he is a man? Is a man a worm, Hobson, that 
you can tread on him or bait a hook with him 
at will ! 

"Allah is Allah! " cries the Turk, and spits 
a baby on his sword, rapes a woman, burns a 
city, or devastates a province! 

"Business is business!" cries Hobson, and 
turns off a consumptive typewriter, defrauds a 
trustful creditor, or crushes poor Dobson like 
an eggshell ! 

You are your own judge now, Hobson, and 
if that motto seems to justify your infamy, go 
on ! But the faster you go and the further 
you go, the nearer you come to a tribunal 
where you will be "hoist with your own pe- 
tard." 

I can imagine no worse punishment than 
having the poor creditors whom you have 
crushed, follow you around among the stars, 
crying, "Business is business, Hobson, busi- 
ness is business ! " 

How long since you read those words of the 
gentle Portia ? 



THE OPTIMIST. 



140 



" The quality of mercy is not strain'd; 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the blessed place beneath; it is twice 
bless'd; 

'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes 

The throned monarch better than his crown; 

His scepter shows the force of temporal power, 

The attribute to awe and majesty 

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of Kings — 

But mercy is above this scepter'd sway, 

It is enthroned in the heart of Kings, 

It is an attribute of God himself, 

And earthly power doth then show likest God's 

Where mercy seasons justice." 

Business is business, Hobson ; but mercy is 
business, too ! 



150 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XLII. 



""HEY had met for the first time since boy- 



A hood, and were dining together. 
One of them was ruddy, rubicund, and jolly. 
The word "success" was written upon his 
forehead as plainly as if it had been put there 
in purple ink by a rubber stamp. 

The other was pale, a trifle stooped, serious, 
chastened, and gave you the impression that 
he had struggled hard with the great foes of 
human happiness, and grappled long with the 
problems of human destiny. 

They were powerfully attracted to each 
other by old memories, and similar associations 
with the past, but they were suffering under an 
unconfessed feeling of repulsion by the con- 
sciousness of present tendencies in opposite 
directions of thought and feeling. Their 
hearts were drawn together at one moment, as 
if about to meet in perfect sympathy, and then 
just as they almost touched, flew apart like two 
objects charged from the opposite poles of an 
electric battery. 

At length the pale man drew from his 
pocket-book a clipping from a newspaper, and 
passed it across the table, saying to his friend, 




THE OPTIMIST. 



151 



"What do you think of that, Jo? Does it 
come any -where near expressing the true facts 
about our lives in this strange world ? " 

He drew his gold-bowed glasses from their 
case, adjusted them to his nose in his lordly 
fashion, and read aloud these words : 

" There is no gain except by loss, 
There is no life except by death, 
No glory but by braving shame. 
Xor justice but by taking blame/' 

Laying the paper down by his finger-bowl, 
he put his glasses back in their case, looked 
up with one of those smiles which covered his 
face as the summer sunlight covers a broad 
landscape, and answered sententiously : 

"Sounds to me like Tommy-rot, Frank." 

"Yes?" replied his companion in one of 
those interrogatives which implies a difference 
of opinion without the desire for debate. 

It would have been like pouring water on a 
duck's back to tell that sleek, well-fed embry- 
onic man who never knew a loss, who never 
had seen a death, who never had suffered 
shame, who never had voluntarily borne an- 
other's blame, the deep secrets of man's mortal 
life! 

The plowshare of sorrow must prepare the 
soil in such a heart before the seeds of divine 
wisdom will sprout. 

Frank knew this. 



152 



THE OPTIMIST. 



The great truths written in that quatrain had 
come home to his own heart through many 
deep experiences which were sacred secrets. 

These truths are esoteric by the very nature 
of things. The inner circle of students who 
are near to the heart of nature may go forth 
from her shrine and babble them never so 
loudly, and only the chosen ones will under- 
stand. 

The name of the door to that inner sanctuary 
is sorrow. It never opens except to him who 
comes in tears. 

The prosperous, unscathed, unchastened man 
may know all the exoteric doctrines, politics, 
science, finance ; but poetry, philosophy, and 
religion have a language of their own. which 
only the sufferer can comprehend. 

Do not blame Nature for cruelly withholding 
her divinest knowledge. She proclaims these 
doctrines from the housetops. All hear, but 
none can understand until the hour of suffer- 
ing comes. Tis then the door opens ! 

Frank told me that the truths contained in 
those four lines had made a profounder im- 
pression of the indescribable grandeur of ex- 
istence upon his own mind than ail the facts 
of modern science. 

"Are they worth all it cost you to learn 
them ? " I asked. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



153 



He answered, "Yes, and more, for joys 
only impregnate, while sorrows bring forth."' 

If you do not understand them now. you can 
at least commit them to memory, and some 
day. beside a coffin, or upon a cross, their 
divine meaning will come to you with an all- 
illuminating and an all-sustaining power. 

" There is no gain except by loss. 
There is no life except by death. 
No glorv but by bearing shame. 
Xor justice but by taking blame." 



154 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XLIII. 



a T ET me out at Shillito street/' she said in 



^ a strident voice, as she threw herself 
into a seat in an Avondale car. 

The conductor bestowed upon her a distant 
bow. 

"Is this Shillito?" she asked, nervously, 
when we turned the corner at Hunt and 
Broadway. The conductor moved his head 
solemnly from right to left. 

"This must be Shillito," she ejaculated, 
springing to her feet as McGregor avenue 
came in sight. The conductor stared coldly 
and impassively at her, without giving a sign. 

" Do n't you forget to let me off at Shillito," 
she screamed, as we passed Oak street without 
stopping. The conductor fixed his keen blue 
eyes upon her, holding her as the Ancient 
Mariner did the Wedding Guest. 

"Shillito!" he shouted. She gathered her 
bundles together and swept out of the car like 
a hurricane, followed by a glance of scorn that 
would have withered her to a dry stalk if she 
could have appreciated it. 

I caught the conductor's eye after he had 
unhooked it from the retreating figure, and as 




THE OPTIMIST. 



155 



my glance was full of sympathy, he said : " If 
this was my private car, she could n't ride for 
five dollars a trip." 

" She did not seem to have much confidence 
in you," I responded. 

"That was what galled me," he answered. 
"What a man needs is to have people trust 
him. No man in the world can do his best 
work in an atmosphere of suspicion. The 
way to appeal to a man's honor is to believe in 
him." 

Now, I know from personal experience that 
there are few things that try a man's faith more 
than to ask a conductor to put him off at a cer- 
tain place on a new line, and then to sit per- 
fectly quiet while the car passes street after 
street, with the conductor looking as if he were 
building castles in Spain ! But what the con- 
ductor asked was only justice, and what he 
said was right, and I want to bear testimony to 
the claims that the conductors have upon our 
confidence. 

I have traveled the Avondale road for two 
years, and have yet to see the first ungentle- 
manly act of a conductor, or hear the first dis- 
courteous word from one of them. I have 
often wondered if they were as polite in their 
private life as they are in the public cars, and 
whether they never "talk back" when off 
duty. 



156 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Some people keep all their cross words and 
sour looks for the loved ones at home. Polite- 
ness to customers is paid for. It is gratis to 
friends. 

Street car conductors are the greatest of so- 
cial levelers. They are animated weighing 
machines, into the slots of which we drop our 
nickles, only to find that the social specific 
gravity of Dives and Lazarus is identical. 

I wish that we were all thus forced to abolish 
class distinctions. I feel a deep pity for wait- 
ers in restaurants and porters in sleeping cars, 
who are under almost irresistible pressure to 
measure men by that hateful standard, a "tip." 
There is a grim satisfaction in being able to say 
to one's self, "This offensive snob has no more 
claims upon me than that timid woman in the 
faded shawl." 

I love to be in a car where wage earners, 
with their hard hands and plain clothing, sit 
down by the side of the lady of society at 
whose throat burn diamonds, and beside the 
scholar, whose face reveals a daily communion 
with the great scenes of history. 

There is no other place where I so feel the 
essential "oneness" of humanity as in a street 
car. There I become unusually sensible of 
the universal brotherhood of man. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



157 



XLIV. 

TN a vine-shaded porch beneath my study 
^ window there is a gorgeous and com- 
municative parrot. In conversation he is dis- 
obliging ; but in soliloquies and epigrams he is 
incomparable. 

There are no funnier stories than those told 
about parrots. They are saturated with wis- 
dom, and have the delicious flavor of antiquity. 
All of them, no doubt, can be traced to the 
days when the bronzed sailor-boys or the 
bearded travelers came back to the palaces 
on the Nile, from far away Ophir or the 
tropical glades in the heart of Africa. Here 
are two of the stories : 

" The new minister was growing eloquent in 
his eulogy over the body of a man who had been 
the terror of his family and the shame of his 
neighborhood. A parrot who had studied the 
habits of the deceased for many years interrupted 
him with the harsh cry, ' You talk too much ; 
you talk too much.'" So runs the old, old 
tale, and no new one can be invented to dis- 
place it. That was the trouble with many 
people whom I used to know. They talked 
too much. 



158 



THE OPTIMIST. 



"A gentleman (?) was trying to teach his 
parrot to say ' uncle.' 

"'Say uncle,' he said. The bird was 
silent. 'Say uncle,' he shouted. The parrot 
bestowed upon him a glassy stare. ' Say 
uncle,' he screamed. Polly gave an exaspe- 
rating wink. 

" 'Take that/ said his infuriated teacher, 
wringing his neck and throwing him out of the 
window. In the afternoon he wandered into 
the garden to examine a young brood of 
valuable chickens. 

" The parrot stood near the coop, with one 
of them in his claw. ' Say uncle ! ' he croaked, 
and upon the third refusal he wrung the 
chicken's neck, and threw him down, crying 
'Take that.' 

" It was the last chicken of the twelve." 

This used to be a favorite method in eccle- 
siastical circles, but we are getting so far 
Christianized now that we say "please," and 
it is becoming unpopular to wring people's 
necks for refusing to say denominational 
" uncles." 

There may not be such immortal humor 
in the head of my neighbor's parrot, but 
he is full of sound and irrepressible common 
sense. 

"Well, well, well," he says, and after a 



THE OPTIMIST. 



159 



little reflection — "It's all right! It's all 
right ! " 

I have occasionally been in a frame of mind, 
since the bird has been occupying the porch, 
when his words sounded decidedly personal. 
To be sitting here wishing that something or 
other was something else, and here a voice 
from the outside world cry, "Well, well. well. 
It's all right; it's all right!" is startling, if 
not grewsome. 

But the parrot is correct, and I know it. 
Somehow or other " it's all right."' or it would 
not be so. and if he can sit there in his narrow 
cag*e. wishing himself away in the shadows of 
some gorgeous forest in the tropics, plucking 
the luscious berries and crooning by the side 
of his mate, and then comfort himself with 
that profound philosophy of his, I am a little 
bit ashamed to let him be more of a man than 
I am ! 

"Well, well, well. It's all right; it's all 
right !-' ? 

" Cribbed, cabined and confined," we all 
are. Hemmed in by our mortal limitations, 
manacled by some sorrow, loaded with some 
burden, we chafe and fret and fight against 
the fixed and changeless laws of nature and 
the unalterable laws of God. 

How foolish it all is ! Millions of other 
captives have occupied the cage before us. and 



160 



THE OPTIMIST. 



while many of them have worn their wings 
out, beating them against the bars, and some 
have devoured their own hearts in wretched- 
ness, countless brave and believing ones have 
settled down to the sweet, old faith of God's 
parrot and his saints, "It's all right; it's all 
right ! " 



THE OPTIMIST. 



161 



XLV. 

T FOUND the Doctor standing in the corner 
■*of a meadow, his hands folded across his 
breast, and a drop of moisture on either cheek, 
which, although the day was hot, had not the 
qualities of perspiration. 

He was gazing at a patch of elder bushes 
and golden-rods, which were all matted to- 
gether in the angles of a stake-and-rider fence. 

An opening had been cut into this miniature 
forest, and a clearing made. We could just 
see from where we were a rude oven, con- 
structed of flat stone and the broken top of an 
old cook stove. Near it stood a table consist- 
ing of a rough board, resting in the "Y's" of 
some forked stakes. On its top were frag- 
ments of china dishes, and around it were 
blocks of wood for chairs. 

We moved toward it by a common impulse, 
stooped low, entered, and sat down. A few 
moments passed in silence, broken only by the 
wild song of a bob-o-link ? which had dropped 
down upon the top of a mullein weed in the 
meadow, and which we heard only as men 
hear music in their dreams. Our thoughts 
had drifted backward thirty years or more, 



162 



THE OPTIMIST. 



and were floating among the scenes of child- 
hood. 

4 'What's the matter, old man?" said I at 
last. (He had nine more gray hairs than I.) 
" What are you thinking about?" 

I spoke gently, fancying that I could read 
his thoughts, and when he answered, his 
voice was very quiet, and had something of a 
childish treble in its tone. 

" There was just such a meadow as this in 
Penfield," he answered, "and we reached it 
by a long lane through which the cows scamp- 
ered in the morning, and dawdled back at 
night with bursting udders. In a corner of 
that meadow there was just such a bower — 
elderberry bushes, golden-rods, cook stove, 
china dishes, and all. 

"Many a long Saturday afternoon have I 
spent in it, with a coterie of blissful, blessed 
little aborigines, innocent and happy as the 
first family in Paradise. Never did food taste 
so good as the tarts and crullers and biscuit 
and jam gathered surreptitiously from pantries, 
closets, and cellars. 

"Never was companionship so sweet, never 
talk so sparkling, never beauty so adorable, 
never courtesy so genuine. 

"I have broken bread in my day at the 
tables of princes. I have heard humorists 
who have set a Nation in a roar, poets who 



THE OPTIMIST. 



163 



have voiced the unuttered emotions of a peo- 
ple's heart, legislators who have made its laws, 
generals who have saved its institutions — crack 
their wittiest jokes, utter their profoundest ep- 
igrams, narrate their most thrilling stories, re- 
cite their sweetest songs, at tables covered with 
silver dishes, in mansions decorated with con- 
summate art ; but the memories of those feasts 
in the elderberry arbor throw them all into 
the shade. I would give more to live over 
again one of those glorious" — 

Just then we heard children's voices. 

" Let us run,' 1 ' said I. 

"By no means," replied the Doctor. "It 
is an answer to prayer ! " 

The bushes parted. A bevy of children 
entered and stood wide-eyed upon the thresh- 
old. 

"My little lords and ladies," said the Doc- 
tor in that voice that soothed the suffering, 
encouraged the timid,, and strengthened the 
dying, ' 'let us stay. We will be good and 
quiet." 

The young cavaliers frowned at first, and 
laid their hands upon their swords. For a 
few moments the little dames were shy. But 
the gentle Doctor disarmed distrust, and in a 
few moments little white arms, bared to the 
shoulders, were setting the tables, little red 
lips were giving orders, little bare feet were 



164 



THE OPTIMIST. 



running errands, big knees were crunched 
under low tables, old hearts were young again, 
long years of struggle and pain were forgotten, 
and we once more ate ambrosia and drank 
nectar in the Garden of the Gods. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



165 



XLVI. 

T^HE baseball player who makes a sacrifice 
* hit, hits the crowd as well as the ball. 

Perhaps a three-bagger would put him at the 
top of the batting list for the season, and, like 
us all, he has his own ambitions. But no mat- 
ter. There are two men 
on bases. He stands be- 
side the plate. The first 
ball is an easy curve, a 
sheer temptation. With a 
quick act of self-suppres- 
sion and a muttered " get 
thee behind me, Satan/' 
he bunts it lightly and goes 
out at first. 

The fans howl, for he 
has advanced the runners 
by a sacrifice of himself. 

We call it a sacrifice hit, but it is not a hit 
that is sacrificed. It is a man. 

We do not go to ball games for sermons, but 
every sacrifice hit of every sort in life is a ser- 
mon and a sacrament. It is a revelation of the 
deepest and most sacred principle of nature. 





166 



THE OPTIMIST. 



" It is expedient that one man die for the 
people." 

In the early dawn of life, our barbarous an- 
cestors made these sacrifices ; but, mark you, 
not of themselves. Vaguely discerning that 
all desires were gained, and all ambitions real- 
ized, only by the loss of something else, by 
some deprivation or surrender, they tried to 
obey the law by sacrificing birds and beasts, 
and even human beings. 

The turning point in the history of humanity 
came when the Carpenter of Nazareth sacrificed 
himself. And here upon the ball field you be- 
hold a gleam of the same principle that flashed 
forth in immortal beauty on Calvary. The in- 
dividual sacrifices himself for the cause, for the 
mass, for others ! The one man is only one- 
ninth of the team. Eight-ninths are greater 
than one-ninth. The reputation of the team, 
the success of the cause demands the sacrifice, 
and whether it is Buck Ewing, McPhee or 
" Dusty" Miller, the victim lays himself upon 
the altar. 

So does the mother for her babe, the sailor 
for his vessel, the engineer for his passengers, 
the nurse for her patient, the patriot for his 
country, the shepherd for his flock, the martyr for 
his cause. The whole tendency of civilization 
is toward the universal adoption of this princi- 
ple. Slowly, painfully, with perpetual strug- 



THE OPTIMIST. 



167 



gles against it and repudiations of it, the mighty 
scheme unfolds. 

There is a clearer perception of it to-day than 
there was yesterday, and there will be a pro- 
founder allegiance to it to-morrow than to-day. 

No government, no church, no business, no 
family is safe until every individual subordinates 
himself to the institution. 

One selfish, ambitious player who persistently 
refuses to sacrifice himself for the others can 
wreck the strongest team in America. 

" Sacrifice yourself for the pennant, for a 
single run, yes, for a single base."' Such is the 
categorical imperative of the great National 
sport. 

Personally, I get more pleasure out of sacri- 
fice hits than home runs, just as I get more 
pleasure out of the contemplation of the char- 
acter of YVilberforce than of Rothschild, of 
Washington than Vanderbilt, of old John 
Brown than Jay Gould. 

I know some people whose lives consist of 
a long series of " sacrificial hits." They are 
beautiful lives. They may never reach first 
base, but by one of the paradoxes of nature 
they will make a great "home run." 



168 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XLVIL 

TN one of our summer rambles we stumbled 
upon a snake in the act of swallowing a 
toad. 

To us it was a horrible tragedy, but the re- 
pose of the actors was like that of wax figures 
in a dime museum. 

There was not a perceptible motion in either 
body, as, yielding to the irresistible suction, the 
toad slid slowly backward into the reptilian 
esophagus. 

Not the slightest expression of gustatory 
pleasure could be discerned in the eye of 
the snake, nor of death terror in that of the 
toad. 

So far as any exhibition of emotion was con- 
cerned, we would have seen as much in watch- 
ing a bullet slide down a gun barrel. 

" Horrible !" screamed the girls from Smith 
College. "Make him disgorge." 

I did so, rapping the sinuous body smartly 
with a cane. 

Without a murmur of disappointment the 
snake threw up his meal, and without a smile 
of thanks the toad hopped out of the jaws of 
his living grave. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



169 



"What made you do that?" exclaimed a 
couple of young Freshmen. "You have 
spoiled our study of a natural phenomenon." 

" Natural phenomenon !" sputtered the girls. 
" Do you think we shall stand by and permit 
this act of monstrous cruelty to go on in order 
that you may coolly observe a natural phenom- 
enon ?" 

"Which is the more cruel," replied the 
Freshmen, with a blunt and almost brutal di- 
rectness, "to save the life of the toad and 
starve the snake, or save the snake by the sac- 
rifice of the toad ? Come, now, which horn 
of the dilemma will you take ?" 

Under cover of the excitement and confu- 
sion which this question created, I slipped 
away, for fear they would refer it to me. 

I took the professor by the button-hole and 
drew him after me to a quiet spot in the 
forest. 

"Reminds me of what Madame Blavatsky 
declared she saw in India," he said, leaning 
meditatively against a tree. "There was a 
hospital (founded three thousand years before 
Christ), where the nurses were bestowing the 
most tender care upon all sorts of sick ani- 
mals. Out in the court-yard a human being 
lay upon the ground in the broiling sunlight, 
covered with a swarm of insects. ' What does 
this mean ?' said Madame Blavatsky, overcome 



170 



THE OPTIMIST. 



with horror. • Oh.' responded her guide in- 
differently, ' a holy man is feeding himself to 
the ants. That spot is never vacant. As 
soon as one is devoured another takes his 
place !' " 

I was quiet for a long time, and so was the 
professor, and we listened to the hum of insects 
upon whom the little birds fed. and shuddered 
as we saw a hawk in the heavens looking for 
the birds. 

'•'Could you answer the Freshmen's ques- 
tion ?" said the professor to me at last. 
"No," said I. "could you?'' 
"No.'' 

A few more minutes passed in silence, dur- 
ing which the awful feast of the higher forms 
of life upon the lower, went on to the caress- 
ing music of whispering breezes and babbling 
brooks. 

"How do you keep your mind from being 
thrown off its balance and plunged into horror 
by this spectacle of universal carnage?"' I in- 
quired at last. 

"'I throw myself back in a sublime solitari- 
ness upon God." he replied, instinctively 
quoting a phrase of Frederick Robinson's. 

" How do you ?" 

"That is my way. too.'" I answered. 
After a few moments of silence, our minds 
were drawn away from these tragic phases of 



THE OPTIMIST. 



171 



existence by birds piping and squirrels chatter- 
ing in the tree tops, butterflies flitting among 
the flowers, fishes darting through the waters, 
and above all, by the voices of the boys and 
girls, who were laughing and singing college 
songs. 

We must not always "look upon the dark 
side of things," said the professor, "'but more 
often laugh and sing."'' 



172 



THE OPTIMIST. 



XLVIII. 

T WAS coming down town on a Sycamore 
street cable car and the gripman lost his 

grip. 

I wish he had been the only man in Cincin- 
nati who had "lost his grip/' or that all the 
rest of them could recover theirs as easily as 
he did his. I can tell a man who has "lost 
his grip " almost as quickly as I see him, and I 
think there are few sadder sights. 

His eye is downcast, his voice is subdued, 
his manner is deprecatory. The great cable 
of success runs swiftly through his hands, but 
he strives in vain to clutch it. He sees multi- 
tudes of other men seize it and go spinning up 
the steep grades to wealth or power or fame, 
but, to save his life, he can not catch on. 

It is an experience which excites in many of 
us bitterness and despair. We blame the 
cable, or the Great Power that propels it, or 
the exceptional few who have grasped it — 
every body and every thing but ourselves. 

And yet there come to us calm and lucid 
moments, when in the light that often flashes 
upon life, we see with clearest vision that it is 
because we are too old, too weak, too ignorant, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



173 



or perhaps too tender and too true. For there 
are some prizes in this life that only those 
can gain who let the great cables drag them 
down into shame and unworthiness. 

Yes, we lose our grip, not so much because 
the cable stops or breaks, as because the foot 
has lost its fleetness, the eye its brightness, 
the hand its cunning, or the mind its alertness. 

And yet life's great peril does not lie so 
much in the fact that we have lost the cable, as 
in the fact that we have lost confidence in our- 
selves. If you have begun to grow timid and 
distrustful, and to say to yourself "'there is 
nothing in me ; I shall never succeed ; I 
was born a failure," you may be certain you 
will never ' ' catch on " ? until vou fi^ht those 
unworthy thoughts down and out. Believe in 
yourself. You great, big, earnest, brave- 
hearted fellow ! that mood of despondency is 
unworthy of you ! You may have lost so 
much by letting go, that you will never be 
what you might have been. But to say that 
there is no place for you in the world, and 
that there is nothing to live for — never ! It is 
unworthy of you. Pull yourself together. 
Keep clutching on the cable. You will surely 
get another hold. 

But let me drop a quiet word into your ear. 
The cable of " success " is not the only one 
that is slipping over the eternal wheels. 



174 



THE OPTIMIST. 



There is another one. longer, stronger, run- 
ning up over a high hill, through green pastures 
and beside still waters, gently, smoothly, with- 
out a break or jar. Many a man who has lost 
the other has seized this, and thanked God for 
the change. 

There is something to live for beside suc- 
cess, even if the scampering, heedless, crazy 
masses do not think so. 

What society needs is a multitude of just 
such quiet, chastened, gentle people as you 
will be, when you get the mad fever of 
" worldliness " out of your veins and settle 
down to taste the real sweetness of life. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



175 



XLIX. 



HERE was an empty car just behind ours, 



A and we were running full tilt down the 
long grade of the Reading road. 

The motorman knew his business, and with 
his eyes fixed upon the track, his foot upon 
the bell, and his hand upon the lever, he let 
her slide, paying no more attention to the 
people who stood at the crossings, signaling him 
to stop than to the hitching posts, gas lamps, 
and telegraph poles. 

At Fern street an elegantly dressed lady 
raised her jeweled finger, as if it could stop 
not only a street car, but a planet. We shot 
past, and her look of complacent confidence 
turned to one of astonished indignation. 

" There are others," shouted a small boy 
from the rear platform. 

A young swell stepped majestically down 
from the curb at McMillan street and walked 
out toward the track, never deigning even to 
look up and make a sign. 

Whiz — went the car, and as we passed, he shot 
a shower of angry sparks from his flashing eyes. 

" There are others," cried the soothing 
small boy. 




176 



THE OPTIMIST. 



At McGregor avenue a gaunt and worried 
woman with a market basket on her arm stood 
in the middle of the road, wildly waving a 
faded umbrella and gesticulating with all the 
.features of her face. 

A cloud of dust enveloped her, and through 
the whirling veil we saw her pass her umbrella 
to her left hand, and, with her clenched fist, 
threaten the conductor's life. 

''There are others!'' screamed the small 
boy, in a voice melodious with consolation. 

To rich and poor, to high and low, to the 
astonished, the disappointed, the indignant, 
and the despairing, without regard to age or 
sex, the young hope-bringer sent out his 
" There-are-others " message. 

And there were others — many others — one 
every three minutes or so, some crowded, 
some half full, and some practically empty. 

What was the use of standing on the corner 
whining and fretting? The small boy could 
not tell, nor can I. 

There are others — take the next car ! 

A blind man could see through that parable, 
you would think. 

But there will be more than one poor soul 
who reads these words who will scorn the 
analogy, and declare that for him the very last 
car has gone by without stopping ! 

"I stood here," he will tell us pleadingly, 



THE OPTIMIST. 



177 



' 'by the great highway, eager, earnest, full 
of hope, and one after another the golden op- 
portunities of life rushed past." 

He forgot to tell us how he was too late 
for one, and asleep at another, and idling by 
a third ! 

4 ''But, however, they are gone," says he. 

And gone they are, the best of them, per- 
haps. For they are not alike, like the street 
cars — these golden chariots — our opportuni- 
ties ! 

There is perhaps always a best one, and a 
next best, and so on down the line, and you 
may have indeed missed the great climactic 
chance of life. 

But there are others ! 

There is always a next best, and a next ! 

Look up the track ! Give heed to the words 
of the hope-bringer ! 

Take the next car ! 

For all you know, a chance may now be 
bearing down upon you out of the unknown, 
to retrieve your lost fortune, to regain your 
lost position, to realize your pet ambition, to 
do more than you have ever done, to be more 
than you have ever been ! 

But, beware ! Paradox though it may seem ! 
There is always a last car ! It will be serious 
business to lose that ! 



178 



THE OPTIMIST. 



L. 



T the close of the Revolutionary War the 



*■ V thirteen colonies passed through a strange 
experience. 

They were bound together by common in- 
terests, but not by common laws. They were 
the staves of a cask w T hich had never been 
" assembled. ,? 

And so, whenever men met to discuss the 
political situation and their plans for a Federal 
Union, this was the toast that was always pro- 
posed : 

" Here 's a hoop for the barrel ! " 

That hoop was the constitution of the United 
States of America. 

If you have never had to hoop a barrel, you 
may take my word that it is not an easy task. 
Hanging window curtains and putting up stove 
pipes is thought by men of circumscribed ex- 
perience to be the acme of life's difficulties; 
but those feats are merely child's play, compared 
to hooping an old washtub or vinegar barrel, 
which has been allowed to stand in the sun 
until it has fallen apart 

The immortal author of the Mother Goose 




THE OPTIMIST. 



179 



rhymes has declared that nothing is harder than 
getting a broken egg together. 

4$ Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ; 
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall ; 
And all the King's horses and all the King' men 
Could n't put Humpty together again." 

I had rather put together a whole basket of 
broken eggs than one barrel. 

A Scotch minister was brought before his 
presbytery to be tried for a sacrilegious fit 
of laughter which overcame him in the pul- 
pit. 

He exonerated himself by saying that " Just 
as I began my sermon, I saw, through the open 
door of the church, the town ' fool ' passing 
with an immense bucket of water upon his 
head. And as the devil would have it, at that 
very instant, the hoops dropped down over his 
•silly pate, the staves tumbled apart, and he was 
baptized by a sprinkling which would almost 
pass for immersion." 

I dare assert that the poor fool, although he 
might be strong enough to carry a whole bucket 
upon his head, was not wise enough to hoop 
up a broken one. 

There are other barrels besides the wrangling 
states in an incipient Federal Government, 
which badly need " hooping up." 

I might name several families which are all 



ISO 



THE OPTIMIST. 



tumbling apart for lack of paternal government. 
And I have also seen some, which might have 
held together for many long and happy years, 
if there had been true love to bind them. 

Old " Hoard His Money " left an enormous 
"barrel" to his son John : but he did not 
give his son the common sense to keep its 
staves together. They have fallen apart and 
the contents are spilled. 

" Here's a hoop to your barrel,' 3 John. 

But the worst case of all is that of a youngster 
whom I know, who is going to pieces for lack 
of a supreme principle and purpose in life. 
Bright? I should say so — staves enough to 
make as fine a barrel as ever carried hope and 
joy through earth to heaven. Wit, kindness, 
talents of all kinds — every thing in the world 
but a hoop. 

It is pitiful to see him. All gone to pieces 
—but 

" Here's a hoop to your barrel," my boy. 

''Hard to gather the staves up, put on the 
hoop and hammer it down ? " Yes. No won- 
der that men affirm that it requires more than 
human skill and power. " Needs divine help," 
they say. 

But what is your life worth now, with your 
health broken, your energies dissipated and 
your resources scattered ? 



THE OPTIMIST. 



181 



If there is any power in earth or heaven that 
will help you to pull yourself together, you had 
better summon it to your aid, and we old fel- 
lows, who love you, will stand behind you with 
the old Colonial toast : 

" Here's a hoop to your barrel." 



182 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LL 



\ TOXJ are discharged, sir," thundered the 

* Boss to old Grumpy. 
" What for?" he snapped. 
" For standing in your own light ! You are 
like a man who has been given a lantern to do 

his work by on a 
dark night, and 
who fastens it to 
the nape of his 
neck, instead of on 
his forehead. You 
are perpetually 
working in the 
\ shadow of your 
own miserable, 
egotistical, unhap- 
py self. Here are 
your wages. Good- 
by." 

Have you ever noticed that the most of the 
people who live in darkness are standing in 
their own light ? 

There is a true light that lighteth every man 
that cometh into the world. 

Is that too sweeping ? Well, let us, with a 




THE OPTIMIST. 



183 



tear of sympathy, drop out of our considera- 
tion to-day those pitiful creatures who enter 
life without the God-like gift of reason. 

For all the rest of us there is light enough 
in the world to help us make our journey 
safely through it. Even the goose finds light 
enough in the world to help her paddle and 
quack her way through life. The poor snail, 
the blind mole, the feeblest creature that 
swims in the sea, floats in the air, or walks 
upon or burrows in the ground, finds light 
enough to solve the problems of existence. 

And yet men like old Grumpy, curse the 
world and the whole system of things for being 
a dark and tangled labyrinth, in which every- 
body is bound to be bruised and wrecked and 
lost. 

For one, I discovered long ago that when I 
found myself in any darkness, it was of my 
own making. This life is full of insoluble 
mysteries, and I know as little about them as 
anybody. But when it comes to the practical 
problem of living a cheerful, useful, contented, 
and satisfying existence, I know that when 
men fail, it is not because the world is full of 
darkness ; but because they stand in their own 
light and grovel in shadows of their own cast- 
ing. 

Do you think that the women who are living 
lives of shame among us did not see a clear 



184 



THE OPTIMIST. 



beam of light shining upon them from the 
sanctuary of their own souls when they turned 
aside from the right path ? As surely as God - 
has armed a dove or a deer with the instinct 
of self-preservation, He endowed these women 
with the instinct of virtue. 

. Will you tell me that a murderer does not 
walk in the light when he begins his series 
of crimes? I will answer you, with a still 
greater assurance, that he does deliberately 
turn his back to a flood of it — to stand in 
shadows cast by his own passions. 

Do you believe that the multitudes around 
us, who are all tangled up in trouble, mana- 
cled to vicious companions, engaged in illegit- 
imate business, staggering, trembling amidst 
dangers and sorrows, did not have light enough 
to keep them out of these troubles, if they had 
wanted to be kept out ? This is to deny the 
reasonableness of nature, and plunge one's 
self into a " state of permanent intellectual 
confusion." 

There is enough light in life to enable any 
man to reach his goal. When we walk in 
darkness, it is because we stand in our own 
light. W T e make our own eclipses. Every 
man knows how to do better than he does. 
He sees further than he travels. There is 
more light than he uses, and more would shine 
if he did but walk in it. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



185 



"What can I do for you?''' said the King to 
the Philosopher. 

"Stand out of my light!" he answered. 

No doubt kings have obscured much light 
that might have fallen upon philosophers, but 
the deepest shadows across their paths have 
ever been of their own throwing. 

"Stand out of your own light," Grumpy. 
You have done more to make yourself misera- 
ble by your suspicious, complaining, shirking, 
wretched disposition than all the bad laws on 
our statute books and other reviled men and 
conditions all put together. 



186 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LII. 



HE Commercial Tribune will find its way 



into many homes this morning where 
people think they have little enough reason for 
giving thanks. 

The vacant chair by the fireside, the gaunt 
form of hunger brooding over the table, the 
pale figure of misfortune shivering in a corner — 
ah ! how different it all is, from that happy scene 
a year ago I 

There will be multitudes of people saying, in 
the bitterness of their hearts, " Thanksgiving! 
What have we to give thanks for?" 

Perhaps you will have the heart to listen to 
a true story, even though you might resent a 
sermon. 

Fifteen or twenty years ago a certain Mr. 
Ladd, the richest citizen in Portland, Ore., was 
stricken with paralysis and lost the use of his 
limbs. It filled his heart with bitterness and 
rebellion, and, like Job's wife, he was ready to 
curse God and die. 

One day he was being pushed around his 
lawn in a wheel cart, and was gazing at the grass 
and flowers with a soul as unresponsive as 
death. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



187 



Suddenly he heard a cheerful voice cry out, 
" Good morning, Mr. Ladd, I hope you are 
enjoying yourself the day." 

" How can I enjoy myself ?" he answered, 
surlily. 

" Like meself," came the almost gay reply. 

Looking down upon the sidewalk the great 
banker saw a shrunken figure in a wheelcart 
like his own. 

4 'And are you happy? How is that possi- 
ble ?" he asked, in amazement. 

' ' Ten years ago," said the poor Irishman, 
"they took 'me to the hospital. The doctor 
examined me and said : ' Pat, you will never 
walk again.' 

" c In the name of God,' said I, ' what will 
a poor man like me do ?' 

" 'You must keep in the sunshine and be 
joyful and happy,' says he. And I 've minded 
him." 

Tears sprang to the eyes of the rich banker 
as he gazed on the peaceful face of the pauper. 

" Wheel me into the house," he said to his 
nurse. Summoning his family to his side, 
from the depths of a full heart he spoke these 
words (which he repeated to me with his own 
lips) : "I have been a miserable, wicked and 
ungrateful man ; but the days of my ingrati- 
tude are numbered. Henceforth, with the 



188 



THE OPTIMIST. 



help of God, I will live in the sunshine, and 
be joyful and happy." 

He never walked a step, and for the balance 
of his life was carried from his door to his 
carriage and from his carriage to his bank ; 
but his heart was full of love and gratitude to 
God. 

Did you ever know that gratitude is an 
art, a sort of divine knack ? 

People do not have to have "things" in 
order to be grateful ! Things do not produce 
gratitude ! Gratitude is awakened in the heart 
like the sense of beauty. Artists see beautiful 
visions in barracks, garrets, prisons ! Musicians 
hear divine melodies in tempests ! Sculptors 
behold beautiful forms in rough blocks of 
marble ! Grateful people feel gratitude in 
sickness, misfortune, loneliness, poverty ! 

Does that seem strange? Ah! there are 
many strange things. 

But if gratitude is not an independent feel- 
ing in the soul — if it is simply a vulgar result 
proportioned to riches or luxury, why are so 
many rich people so miserable and ungrateful ? 
Tell me that ! 

I am not bound to explain this mystery; 
but it is very important for us to know the 
fact — that gratitude does not depend for its 
existence in the soul, on abundance of luxury ! 

Elder Brewster, the minister to the Pilgrim 



THE OPTIMIST. 



189 



Fathers, when he had nothing for dinner but 
shellfish and water, closed his eyes and thanked 
God " that they were permitted to suck of the 
abundance of the seas and of the treasures hid 
in the sand!" 

Did I not say that gratitude was an art ? I 
have seen a crust of bread and a cup of tea 
awaken more gratitude than a twelve-course 
dinner ! 

If you are not grateful to-day, it will not be 
because you have no great table groaning with 
bounties and " money to burn;" it will be be- 
cause you have not a grateful heart ! 

That would be uncharitable if it were not so 
strangely true. Just as some men's hope burns 
brighter in disappointment, just as some men's 
courage is greatest in danger, so some men's 
gratitude is deepest in misfortune ! 

There is food for thought ! To eat that, 
might do some of us ungrateful people more 
good than a turkey dinner ! 

" Gratitude is the natural response of the 
heart to kindness received or intended " — in- 
tended, mark you. Who knows what kind- 
ness God intends in those troubles of yours ? 



190 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LIII. 



HE humorous and the pathetic have been 



x strongly blended, in the efforts of men to 
accomplish the navigation of the air. 

Herr Lilienthal is not the only inventor 
who has failed to realize his hopes. Not 
many summer days go by without beholding 
the death of some unhappy aeronaut. The 
tragedy of Daedalus is never long " off the 
boards." 

If I were disposed to do so, I could tell a 
very good story of my own. For I, too, like 
every American boy, had my day with "per- 
petual motion " and " flying machines." And 
if, clinging to an umbrella handle, I jumped 
from a barn one morning, to see how a para- 
chute worked, (and saw !), I am only one of 
a million who learned to " shoot the chute" 
long before the days of the Lagoon. 

Nor is Darius Green, with his flying machine, 
the single aspirant to immortal fame upon the 
comic stage. 

In one of the older Ohio communities the 
memory still lingers, of a venturesome lad who 
persuaded himself that he had solved the 
eternal problem of flying through the air. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



191 



Feigning sickness on the Sabbath day, he 
waited until the family had gone to church, 
and then fastened upon his shoulders a pair 
of enormous turkey wings. Ascending the 
roof of the wood-shed, he gave a loud gobble 
and boldly leaped into the air. An hour 
later, when they picked him up, he had just 
strength enough to blubber: "Well, if I had 
only jest had a tail I could have flew ! " 

Poor fellow ! He only stood for a type of 
multitudes who lack but a single appurte- 
nance, either tailpiece or headpiece, to enable 
them to accomplish their boundless ambitions. 

I stood in the trackyard of the Texas and 
Pacific Railroad in the early days of Ft. 
Worth, when the "Lone Star'' state was the 
paradise of adventurers and tramps. 

Three human wanderers were lying on the 
floor of an empty box car, and one of them, 
taking off his hat, held it up to the gaze of his 
companions and said: "I wear the same 
sized hat as Daniel Webster, and if I had only 
had his voice I would have surpassed him as 
an orator ! " 

"If he had only had a tail, he could have 
flew." 

If Goliath had only had a little thicker 
skull, he could have whipped David. If 
Lord Dunraven had only had a better yacht, 
he could have Avon the cup. If the Red 



192 THE OPTIMIST. 

Stockings had only had a better team last 
season, they could have "flew " the pennant. 

My little man. with legs, lungs, wings, and 
gobble, and every thing else that a turkey has 
but a tail, there is a long span between you 
and the bird ! 

But while we laugh, we can not restrain a 
sigh, for this incident brings us to the border 
land of the tragic. 

Of how many human lives has it been true 
that the possession of one more organ, faculty, 
or trait would have enabled them to soar into 
the heavens of wealth or fame ? 

I have seen not a few people who, if they 
had had a little bit more common sense, or 
a little finer imagination, or a little better 
eyesight, or a little deeper voice, or a little 
keener digestion, might have taken their places 
among the immortals as poets, discoverers, 
singers, soldiers, statesmen, or orators. 

When a broken-hearted man lifts up his 
head in the wreck of his hopes and ambitions, 
and sees with a clear vision "that if he had 
only had a tail, he could have flew/' it is not 
altogether a laughing matter. "'So nigh to 
glory is our dust."' 

One day a worm who was wearily crawling 
on the earth looked up and saw a butterfly 
sailing swiftly and joyously through the air. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



193 



"Ah!" said the worm, with a sigh, "If I 
only had wings. I, too, could fly." 

That night, spent with life's toil, discouraged 
by life's narrowness, he began to weave his 
own shroud. He felt the powers of his being 
mysteriously ebb away. He sank into a deep 
and peaceful sleep, and when he awoke, he. 
too, had wings. 



194 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LIY. 

DID you ever pick up a hot copper? 
I have. 

It was when I was a Freshman m college. 

An organ grinder had strolled into the 
campus with hurdy-gurdy on back and monkey 
on arm. 

Traveling from one dormitory to another, 
he poured forth the melting sweetness of his 
lays, while some of the boys danced upon the 
green sward and others tossed peanuts, cookies 
and copper pennies to the weazened monkey, 
who transferred them to the hands of his 
master with a solemn dignity. 

One of the pennies fell at my feet. I 
noticed that it dropped from a window of a 
Sophomore's room, but music had disarmed 
my suspicions. 

As the monkey's attention was divided in 
many directions, he failed to observe the prize, 
and I stooped to pick it up. 

Never shall I forget the sensation. 

I rose into the air with a roar of pain upon 
my lips and a blister on my thumb and finger — 
I who had only that day translated from 
Virgil the immortal sentence: 



THE OPTIMIST. 



195 



'■I fear the Grecians even bearing gifts."' 
Shouts of fiendish delight arose from the 
Sophomores, and my own classmates slunk 
away in mortification at my greenness. I 
stood first upon one foot, then upon the other, 
rolling my eyes a hundred ways in embarrass- 
ment,, wringing my lingers in pain, and having 
only one consolation — that the innocent little 
monkey had been saved from suffering by my 
stupidity. 

I did not dare say it then, for it was " give 
and take " in those days. but. looking back 
over those twenty years. I may say now that it 
was a shabby trick. And yet it was not with- 
out its value in the development of a poor 
little Freshman. 

He has had his eyes open for "hot cop- 
pers " since then, and has been saved not a 
few burned fingers. 

But who escapes them all? They look so 
innocent, and they seem sometimes to fall 
from the hands of angels in the windows of 
heaven. Xo wonder men pick them up. 

Do you remember the fellow they used to 
call " Church Mouse'' because of his poverty? 

Five years or more ago a fortune of a 
hundred thousand dollars fell from the dead 
hands of an old uncle plump at his feet. Pick 
it up ? Of course he did. But it proved to 
be a " hot copper, " burned his lingers, his 



196 



THE OPTIMIST. 



pockets and his soul. The money has gone 
and Church Mouse has gone. 

And, one day, when that fine young fellow 

Easygo was hanging about the lobby of 

House, some one tipped him a wink and 
placed a glass of champagne upon the bar. 

Pick it up? Yes. And they have picked 
him up more than once since then — in the 
gutter. Hot copper ! 

You remember Hail Fellow, and how a 
committee called upon him and offered him a 
job in the city hall? Who wouldn't have 
picked it up ? He did. And do you know 
how long a term he is serving in the state's 
prison ? Hot copper ! 

Shall I tell you one' more story ? It is about 
young Goggleeye. Little Miss Muffet seemed 
to flutter right down from the sky. She was 
all frills and laces, all airs and graces — the 
sweetest and most bewildering vision of loveli 
ness that ever burst upon the eyes of man. 
Goggleeye was warned against her. His old 
father shook his head. His mother besought 
him to think twice. Some of his friends 
exhibited their scars. 

But he picked her up, and a "hot copper" 
she was. He was plucky, though, and I only 
hope she will cool off as the years roll on. 

"If hot coppers would only give some 
sign,*' you say. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



197 



Ah, they would lose their educative power 
if they did. 

No one would pick up a red " hot copper." 

If all the dangerous things in life were 
labeled : "I am hot. Hands off or I'll burn 
your fingers," fools would get along as well as 
wise men. 



198 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LV. 

THE manufacture and use of slang is an 
evil. 

But just as we think we have learned to hate 
it roundly, there darts into use. from a source 
as undiscoverable as that of a meteor, a new 
word or phrase so apt and expressive, that all 
our opposition goes down before it. and it 
forces its way up from the lowest philological 
circles to the highest, and finally, like a fixed 
star or a new constellation, takes its place in 
the firmament of our lexicons and "Familiar 
Quotation Books." 

" Get a move on you.'" was such a phrase. 
There is something irresistible about it. It is 

martial and im- 
perative. It is 
brief, abrupt, 
and crammed 
with signifi- 
cance. The 
motor m a n 
shouts it at 
the farmer 
whose team 
obstructs the track, the hotel clerk shouts it at 




THE OPTIMIST. 



199 



the bell-boy who lingers on the stairs, and the 
policeman shouts it at the crowd which gathers 
around a dog fight. Every body says it to 
every body else who dawdles along the path- 
way of life. 

Its significance and humor (for there is al- 
ways an element of humor in all permanent 
slang), consists in its abrupt revelation of one 
of the fundamental laws of our being. We 
must " get a move on us' ? or be run over. 

There is absolutely no way to stop. If the 
prizes to be gained do not beckon us onward, 
then the forces from behind will push us for- 
ward. It is sad, of course, but is funny too, 
as it is to see a woman driven along by a high 
wind, will she. nill she. 

It is all right, for if our only motive power 
was what little inherent energy we happened 
to have, the most of us would make no more 
progress than the moss on a stone, or a bump 
on a log. We have to be roughly roused from 
our lethargy, and so our tireless, faithful 
mother, Nature, prods us with storms and 
frosts, with gnawing stomachs, and all the 
other wolves of desire and need which howl 
about our paths. 

What would you be to-day if she did not 
follow you, incessantly crying, "Get a move on 
you?" Probably lying under a bread tree in 
a tropical climate, naked, inert, bestial! 



200 



THE OPTIMIST. 



Man's response to this marching order from 
the lips of his great All-mother affords an 
astonishing and amusing spectacle. How full 
the world is of stir and bustle, of men hurry- 
ing to and fro, darting like ants in and out of a 
hill, like bees to and from a hive. 

How many things and people get a move on 
them in a great city like this ! There goes a 
house, slowly and painfully creaking its way 
along. Yonder comes a fire engine, pounding 
and smashing a path through the crowded 
thoroughfare. Street cars dart past like great 
shuttles, bicycles scoot along like stiff-brimmed 
hats on edge before the wind, mighty horses 
snake great loads of coal, fleet roadsters pick 
their way through the crush, men and women 
and children go crowding, jostling, pushing, 
rushing, tearing along in streams, in waves, in 
tides of energetic, restless life. 

It is an irrefragible law of nature that all 
triumphs come by trying, and all progress from 
earnest action. The ceaseless putting forth of 
endeavor, no matter how tired, how sad, how 
unwilling we may be, is the one unchangeable 
condition of existence. 

Let us accept our destiny cheerfully, for this 
one day at least. Do not make drudgery of 
your task. You must do it whether or no, and 
you had better do it cheerfully. 



THE OPTIMIST. 201 

If your work has been getting behind, pull 
it up. 

If it has grown distasteful, so much the more 
reason for doing it well, so that a better task 
may be set you. 

Be faithful. Be courageous. Be eneigetic. 
Get a move on you ! 



202 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LVI. 



OME three weeks or more ago Dobson 



^ heard the subject of Christmas mentioned 
for the first time this season. 

He had been expecting it, and was fully 
prepared. 

His wife had provided an unusually good 
dinner, set his slippers before the fireplace, 
and lighted his pipe. 

The children were in bed. 

"Dick," she said, at last, "what about 
Christmas?" 

"Christmas," he growled in a voice which 
he had carefully trained for the occasion. 
"Christmas! You don't mean to say that 
you have a notion of spending any money in 
that kind of Tomfoolery this year. We might 
as well come to an understanding at once. 
Times are too hard. If we get enough to eat 
we will be doing more than I expect. I don't 
want to hear the word Christmas again." 

Having delivered himself of his oration in 
the very manner which he had fore-determined, 
he fixed his eyes upon the evening paper. But 
his mind was agitated, and he discovered at 
last that the sheet was upside down. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



203 



Next morning at breakfast the little Dobsons 
had the misfortune to begin to talk about 
Christmas. 

"I'll nip this thing in the bud,'' said Dob- 
son to himself. 

Bringing the handle of his knife down upon 
the table with a crash, he roared in a terrible 
voice: "You may as well understand now 
that there are not going to be any Christmas 
presents this year, and the less you say about 
it the better ! ? ' 

If he had said there was not groins; to be 
any more water in the river, nor any more 
oxygen in the air, they could not have been 
more astonished. 

Things looked blue for a while. 

But a few evenings ago Dobson reached 
home earlier than usual, and found his wife 
up to her knees in candy bags and tin soldiers 
and popguns, and heaven alone knew what 
else. 

A thunder cloud covered his face. 

"Dick/ 5 she said, holding up a little bisque 
doll, "don't you think the baby will squeal 
when she sees this ! " 

Something came up in his throat. But dis- 
cipline must be maintained ! 

"Where did you get the money?" he in- 
quired sternly. 

"Do you remember that ten-dollar gold 



204 



THE OPTIMIST. 



piece you gave me on our wedding adver- 
sary? " she answered. "I couldn't bear to 
think of the little children not having any 
Christmas, Dick, indeed I could n't. Bless 
their hearts. Not have a Christmas? I'd die 
first, Dick ! " 

The next day I saw Dobson down street 
blowing his money around like soap bubbles. 
He had been into every store in town. His 
legs were aching as if he had been playing 
football : but his heart was light ! 

He saw the pretty clerk cut off a piece of 
silk from a great roll which lay upon the 
counter, and his eyes danced. 

" Mind you send that to my office," said he. 
4 4 1 do n't want any blunders about this. That 's 
a Christmas present for my wife, dy'e see ? " 

k< I wonder if he has got a younger brother ? " 
said the shop girl to herself, looking after the 
big fellow as he bustled down the aisle and out 
of the door. 

Dear old Dick ! You should have seen his 
'•bear dance"' this morning, when Jenny 
opened that package ! 

" Hurrah for Christmas ! " he shouted, as the 
little Dobsons dove into their stockings. 

He held Jenny back a little as the breakfast 
bell rang and the brood of joyous youngsters 
went tumbling down stairs. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



205 



" Say, Jenny/' he whispered, " how did you 
manage to get away ? " 

" Get away from where ? " she asked in sur- 
prise. 

" Why, from the good place up above," he 
answered, pressing her against his left side 
with his big arm. 

"What can you mean, Dick? Have you 
lost your wits ? " 

"Not a bit of it, old girl. But there must 
have been a great row up there when it got 
out that the star angel of the whole band had 
escaped. What brought you down to this cold 
world, anyhow, tell me that? " 

"Oh," she answered, looking up archly 
from under her long eyelashes, "I saw a big, 
handsome, blundering fellow that needed a 
little looking after ! " 

"'It will be a cold day for me when you 
have to go back," said he, with a suspicious 
quaver in his voice. 

"Mamma didn't run'd away at all," said 
little Dick, who had fallen behind and over- 
heard this tete-a-tete. " She just bringed 
heaven right down wiv her. ; ' 



206 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LVII. 



HE stern pressure of life forces men into 



A dread dilemmas. 
This is one — for a freshman to be pulled 
out of bed at midnight and placed upon his 
study table by a band of sophomores, who 
order him to "tell a story, sing a song, or 
dance ! " 

"Horse play," you say. Yes; but pro- 
phetic — rudely symbolical — after all. The 
same thing happens to a man a thousand 
times in after life — in a little different form. 
It is only another way of repeating that stern 
command of Nature to all her children: "Do 
something. Justify your presence ! You may 
have a wide choice as to what particular thing 
you will perform, but something, you must 
and shall!" And it is this very imperative 
that "calls us out!" Twenty years or more 
ago a Grand Army lodge in a New Hamp- 
shire town determined to develop the talent 
of its members. They passed a resolution 
that every man " should tell a story, sing a 
song or dance." 

The results surprised them, but they ought 




THE OPTIMIST. 



207 



not, for talent lies buried in napkins every- 
where. 

The very first night a grizzled old private, 
whose tongue might have been carried away 
with a grape shot, so far as conversation was 
concerned, began a narrative in a simple, un- 
assuming style, but as he continued to spin the 
delicate thread, his hearers held their breath, 
and Sheherazade seemed to have been rein- 
carnated ! 

At the second session another genius was 
evoked. No one would have dreamed that 
there was any music in his soul. His com- 
panions had never even heard him whistle to 
a dog ! But that evening when he lifted up 
his voice and sang " The Star Spangled Ban- 
ner," the old veterans sprang to their feet and 
reached for their swords. 

The third evening came, and every one 
thought that the talent of the lodge had been 
exhausted. But some one had to dance ! 

Out into the middle of the floor where the 
imaginary camp fire was burning lumbered 
the ponderous figure of a corporal who had 
taken on fat, and now tipped the scales at two 
hundred and sixty-nine. His great figure 
swayed to the music of the snarling fife a 
moment, and then he sprang to his work. The 
elasticity and suppleness of youth were in the 
legs of this Colossus. He leaped into the air, 



208 



THE OPTIMIST. 



he bounded, he whirled, he spun upon his toes 
like a dervish, he floated like a fairy, and the 
bodies of the astounded spectators swayed to 
his motions, while they clapped their hands and 
shouted. 

We do not know what is in men, while they 
lie snoring in their beds like the freshman ! 
They must be hauled out and set upon a table 
and hear the stern, imperative: ^ Tell a story, 
sing a song, or dance ! ' y 

Daniel Webster only paraphrased these words 
when he bade his countrymen " sink or swim, 
live or die. survive or perish." 

Who can not remember some dramatic 
moment when the converging lines of events 
lifted him onto a table and confronted him 
with this dilemma? 

Twenty years ago or more I forgot the 
manuscript of a sermon. The pulpit was my 
table. The people looked up at me and I had 
to do something ! And so I preached ! 

Emergencies possess developmental force. 
They are men-makers. 

Instead of regretting that the emergencies 
are so pressing, we might more wisely regret 
that they are not more so — if we care to 
know what tremendous possibilities lie dor- 
mant in us. 

I know men who could lead an army to vic- 
tory, sail a Cunarder across the ocean, manage 



THE OPTIMIST. 



209 



a college, or even run a newspaper — if they 
had to ! 

It is painful, of course, to be hoisted upon the 
table, hear the inexorable behest, and shudder 
at the effort : but many an immortal romancer, 
poet, or terpsichore has been born in the 
throes of that agony. 

Come now ! Begin. Recite. Sing. Dance. 
Do something, or make room for better men ! 



210 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LVIII. 



HERE often comes a critical moment in 



A a ball game, ' when a glorious victory 
may be achieved by the players "bunching 
their hits." 

The tide has been running against them. 
The umpire is partial or incompetent, their op- 
ponents lucky, their own men rattled, the spec- 
tators sulky, and an invisible force seems sweep- 
ing them to defeat. 

Suddenly a stupid muff, or a lucky hit, 
places a couple of runners on the bases. 

Now watch ! They had been doing all they 
could; but summoning up from the depths of 
their being some balky reserve of strength, 
they force themselves to do more ! 

" Bunch your hits, boys," whispers the cap- 
tain. " Line 'er out," yells the crowd. Smash 
goes the bat of the great Buck ; crack, bang, 
pling, those of McPhee, Irwin, and Miller, 
and away go the runners, sliding, tumbling, 
stealing second, third — over the home plate ! 
The game is ours, hurrah ! 

That's what comes from "striking while 
the iron is hot," from "spurting" at the 
critical moment, from " bunching your hits " 




THE OPTIMIST. 



211 



when the enemies' team is stupefied and help- 
less. 

To possess a fund of reserve strength, after 
every ounce of power has supposedly been ex- 
hausted, to be able to summon it forth at the 
supreme instant, to know how to strike a few 
sharp and terrible blows when the enemy is 
dazed or groggy, this is often the secret of 
victory in the varied struggles of our earthly 
life. 

The great end to strive for must always be 
the long, steady, powerful, tireless movement 
of muscle or of brain. Spasms of industry, 
epileptic fits of effort, are fatal to every player, 
as well as to every toiler. 

But all movements of life are not alike. 
There come instants that are supreme," and 
when the tide that leads to fortune rolls in, the 
swimmer must have a few ounces of reserve 
strength with which to mount it and lay his 
hand upon its crest. 

The existence of that reserve is a mystery. 

The " Reds " were playing as hard as they 
could when the crowd cried: ' 4 Bunch your 
hits !" The boat crew was rowing its best, 
until its backers, with a wild roar of excite- 
ment, made it " spurt." The bicycler was 
straining every nerve until his friends burst 
their lungs with that wild cry, " Scorch." 
The knight knew nothing of that hidden flame 



212 



THE OPTIMIST. 



of energy that shot from his soul, when, just 
as he was going down, he caught sight of a 
beseeching face and saw a scarlet ribbon flut- 
tering down into the arena! 

There is no more wonderful, as there is no 
more beautiful, sight in the world than that of 
a mother, whose every moment is absorbed 
and every energy exhausted in the ordinary 
daily life of her household, making that aston- 
ished discovery of her "hidden reserves" 
when the scarlet fever steals into her brood of 
little ones, and lays them low. 

What she did before was child's play to the 
herculean tasks which she now performs. 
Where did she get that inexhaustible strength ? 
God only knows, for He gives it. 

It is a sublime comfort to believe in that 
hidden fund of power, in the new vein of gold 
into which the pick will strike just as the old 
one is exhausted — the new fountain that will 
burst forth just as the old one has gone dry. 

" There is a divinity which shapes our ends, 
rough-hew them how we may." There is also 
a divinity within us which gives us strength in 
every hour of need. 

There are men who have "lain down" in 
these hard times just at the critical moment, 
when, if they had called out their reserves and 
" bunched their hits," they might have won a 
glorious victory. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



213 



LIX. 



o 



NE day at a time." 
of the morrow. 3 



" Take no thought 
"Sufficient unto 



the day is the evil thereof." This is the true 
philosophy of our life. 

To meet the trials and bear the burdens of 
earthly existence as if they all lay between the 
rising and the setting of a single sun is the 
privilege of manhood. 

Who is there among us that has a burden 
which he could not bear for fourteen or six- 
teen hours, if that were all ? But that is all. 
for life comes to us a single day at a time. 
At its close is that miniature of death — sleep. 
It is the "looking before and after.'' the 
"pining for what is not," that makes havoc 
with our peace. It is carrying the weight 
which was really taken from us yesterday, 
and bearing the one that will not be laid 
upon us until to-morrow, that robs life of its 
sweetness. 

There is a vast difference between the load 
which an expressman's horse drew out of 
Avondale yesterday and the one he would have 
to haul if, like ourselves, he drew behind him 
all the trunks that were on his wagon last year 



214 



THE OPTIMIST. 



besides all those that will be piled upon it in 
the year to come! One load at a time is 
enough for him — the sensible fellow ! If it is 
our glory that we are able to remember and 
to imagine, it is our shame that we so abuse 
those divine capacities as to make them the 
ministers of our most poignant miseries rather 
than our divinest joys. 

Many readers of this morning's paper are 
saying to themselves, "I can not carry this 
load another day. My back is breaking with 
its weight, and I must lay it down." 

Others have been struggling long against 
some terrible temptation, and on this morn- 
ing have risen with a vague apprehension that 
before the sun has set they shall have suc- 
cumbed. 

Do not do it yet. You can bear it one 
more day. It is only a few short hours. You 
do not know what a day or an hour may bring 
forth. This day is short, and to-morrow may 
never come, or if it does come, it may bring 
surcease of sorrow. 

Gird yourself once more for the battle. 
When David Livingstone was making one of 
his immortal journeys in the Dark Continent, 
his provisions failed, and he was reduced to 
the brink of starvation. There is not a mur- 
mur in his journal. He records the fact as if 



THE OPTIMIST. 



215 



it were a mere commonplace, and simply adds, 
61 I tightened my belt," 

You can do as much as he. Tighten 
your belt and go on. 
You will find a date- 
tree to satisfy your 
hunger, a fountain 
to slake your thirst, 
a river to float your 
burden, an herb to 
heal your w T ound. 

All men are born 
to three things — 
labor, sorrow, and 
joy. Your cup is 
not filled w T ith either 
one alone. There 
will be something of 
each in it, and you may be destined to find 
your joy at the bottom. 

Tighten your belt and go on. Do not let 
this be the day that sees you, the kind and 
tender husband, repudiate your marriage 
bonds; you, the loving, dutiful son, renounce 
and betray your filial duty; you, the faithful 
clerk, deceive and betray your employer ; 
you, the patient and gentle mother, give way 
to the flood of anger at those noisy little 
children. 




216 



THE OPTIMIST. 



It is only for one day that you must toil and 
struggle. 

Take no thought for the morrow, for the 
morrow shall take thought for the things of 
itself. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



217 



LX. 



Y friend Hopewell is one of those noble 



iy fellows whose diffidence keeps them 
from being known and appreciated. 

•• I was walking slowly along Fourth street 
the other day.'* said he to me. "'when there 
passed by in the driving rain a man whose 
history I would give a good deal to know. 

"He was holding a torn and faded umbrella 
against the storm with his right hand, and on 
his left arm he was carrying a little child 
wrapped in a threadbare shawl, out of a narrow 
opening in which, its weazened face peeped, 
and from the face two pitiful little eyes looked 
out upon the world. 

'•'The man's clothing was old and shiny, his 
step slow and aimless, his countenance dull 
and hopeless. 

" Something in the appearance of these two 
wretched figures arrested my attention and my 
steps. I followed them with my eyes until 
they vanished in the hurrying crowds. They 
keep stealing upon my memory as they stole 
upon my sight, shuffling in and out in such a 
wretched way that I am sure if their history 
were known it would be a tragic one." 




218 



THE OPTIMIST. 



" Why did you not follow them and ask him 
to give it to you?" I said. 

"Follow him and ask him?" he answered, 
in surprise. " There is a certain sacredness in 
sorrow. There is a privacy in grief which 
ought not to be penetrated profanely. And. 
then, I might have been mistaken. Perhaps I 
was. At any rate. I wish he knew, poor fel- 
low, how near he was to sympathy and help. 
I had a little money in my pocket and a little 
idle time on hand, and should have suffered 
less in actively helping him to bear his real 
burden than in this passive misery which I en- 
dure in thinking of him." 

"When you stop to reflect.''" I said, " there 
is something pathetic in the fact that need and 
help, weakness and strength, pass so near each 
other so many times without meeting." 

■'That's it," he answered, eagerly. 

"There is Christian charity enough in Cin- 
cinnati to relieve every remediable pain in 
every human heart, if genuine need could be 
introduced to genuine pity and help. The 
one creeps in the by-ways, the other walks the 
streets. The one conceals itself, while the 
other seeks. What we really do see, is impos- 
ture. We are so often deceived, and at length 
we become hardened or discouraged. 

"In the meantime, real need masquerades 
under a cheerful countenance, and help hides 



THE OPTIMIST. 



219 



behind an impenetrable one, and the two" 
forms pass by, unconscious of each other's ex- 
istence, the one perhaps dying with sadness or 
bursting with hate, while the other devours 
itself for lack of a true object to feed upon." 

"And for that matter/'* I replied, ;; how near 
we ail come to many good things we never 
really meet !" 

••'Just at the moment when that fine young 
fellow who killed himself the other day for 
lack of work passed a certain Fifth street 
store, the proprietor said to his bookkeeper, 
"If I could get the right man in that vacant 
place, I would give him a hundred dollars a 
month." 

This remark almost betrayed Hopewell into 
telling something which I had long suspected. 

"Yes," he said, in his quiet, absent way. 
:, we all have heart needs and soul hungerings. 
and the tragedy of life is that we miss those 
who can satisfy them. I once saw a face for a 
moment which, if I could have seen every 
day. would have" — 

He paused abruptly, extended his hand, and 
turned away without finishing his sentence. 

Poor fellow ! His life is incomplete. 

Will all need ever meet all help? 

Let us hope so — somewhere, some time. 



220 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXI. 

TJE was coming back from a country spin. 

^ His progress along the Reading road 
was a painful one. Dripping with perspiration 
and too tired to walk, he was " pumping " as 
hard as he could, and bumping wretchedly 
along, while his rubber tire sucked and swashed 
beneath him. 

" Mister, you Ve got a puncture." 

"You've got a puncture, mister." 

" How did you get that puncture, Cap'n?" 

"Bad puncture, boss." 

After hearing thirty or forty of these ex- 
clamations from small boys and corner loafers, 
poor Jones got mad, got off and pushed. 

The pain of one puncture offsets the pleasure 
of five hundred safe trips, as every expert 
knows. But to poor Jones it came with all the 
force of a revelation. 

There is only one thing in the world more 
helpless and miserable than a bicycler with 
a punctured tire. It is one of those frogs 
which lifts itself from the bottom of Mobile 
Bay to the surface, by distending its abdomen 
— when that great air sack is pricked by a pin 
in the hands of a darky fisherman. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



221 



The collapse is pitiful, and it would be 
wicked to laugh if it were possible not to. 

It is a world of pricked bubbles and 
punctured tires. 

Pharaoh "punctured his tire" at the Red 
Sea, Xerxes at Salamis, Napoleon at Waterloo, 
and Cornwallis at Yorktown. 

Young Ferdinand Ward "'punctured his 
tire" in the New York stock market. John 
Sullivan at New Orleans, General Coxey at 
Washington, and next June there will be 
dozens of punctured tires in the great political 
conventions. 

The road to fortune is full of tacks, and the 
pneumatic tires of the ambitious go pop, pop, 
pop. The contestants start gayly forth in the 
morning of life, but come sadly back in the 
evening, and the merciless wits along the 
wayside greet them with the hated cry, 
" You 've got a puncture, mister ; got a punc- 
ture, got a puncture." 

As if he did not know it, poor fellow ! 

I know whole troops of young men who are 
rolling along in their good clothes, with all the 
accompaniments of wine suppers and theaters, 
cutting a wide swath as they go, sought after, 
admired, caressed, but they are doing it all on 
wind. 

Be careful, boys; there are tacks on that 
road — an angry landlord, a disgusted em- 



222 THE OPTIMIST. 

ployer, a policeman in brass buttons, a fellon's 
cell, a drunkard's grave. You remember how 
the gamblers and the "fast set" punctured 
the Prodigal's tire in the far country ? He 
walked home you know, and a long, hard trip 
he had of it. All he had in the world was 
company. The prodigal with the punctured 
tire is always sure of that. 

I dread to see the journey of life made on 
wind. Take off your pneumatic tire for that 
trip and put on the one that is solid. It may 
not ride so easily, but at least it will not 
puncture. 

Be careful on life's journey, son, 

Of making great pretensions. 
You '11 " get a puncture,'' and you '11 shrink 

To pitiful dimensions. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



223 



LXIL 

TV /TAN is an animal who laughs, who w T eeps, 
and who builds artificial roads. 

The last product of his genius is — the "cin- 
der path." In a new country he begins by 
following the trail of the wild animals through 
forests and over mountains. He widens this 
into a bridle path, a wagon road, and finally 
the bed of a railway. The deer is the first and 
greatest civil engineer. 

The macadam, the granite, the asphalt pave- 
ment, even the magnificent cracked rock, cedar- 
tied, steel-railed highway of the New York 
Central pale before the splendors of the cinder 
path. 

No one has fully measured the possible joy 
of life until he has taken a ten-mile spin over a 
cinder path on a high-geared, well-oiled, pneu- 
matic-tired bicycle. Nothing but the flash of 
a salmon up the Columbia, or the flight of 
an eagle over the summits of the Rockies, 
can be placed in the same category. Horse- 
back riding is mere jolted misery by comparison. 

Such a path connects Clinton with Utica. 
It is less than twelve inches wide, and looks to 
you, when your wheel first strikes it, like the 



224 



THE OPTIMIST. 



rope on which Blondin crossed the Niagara 
river. " How can I keep my wheel on that 
black silk thread," you say, and you shudder 
at the thought of meeting a "scorcher." 

Away you go like an arrow shot from the 
bow of Apollo. The rubber tire hisses and 
sings as it grips and spurns the cinders, with a 
music like that of water splashed from the prow 
of a yacht. 

You brush your hat against the boughs of 
overhanging apple trees. Chickens cackle and 
scramble from under your wheel as if it were a 
colossal hawk. The farmers' wives run to the 
window; but before you can mutter "rubber 
neck," they have been left in the remote back- 
ground. A yellow dog plunges under a fence 
and makes one vicious snap at your calves ; but 
before he can open his jaws again, you are in 
the next township. Ambitious lads and super- 
annuated old men have built booths along the 
path, and you catch glimpses of ginger ale and 
lemonade, which tempt, but can not stop you. 
The weeds on the sides of the path, bent by 
the swirling air currents, make you gracious 
courtesies as you sweep along. So nod the 
daisies, the buttercups, the milkweeds, the bur- 
docks and the thistles — of which Margaret 
Warner Morley says : " Every thistle is a reve- 
lation and every burdock is a psalm ! " You 
catch glimpses of the brilliant crimson of the 



THE OPTIMIST. 



225 



ripening wild cherry and the delicate green of 
elderberry blossoms. Odors of new-mown hay 
in the meadows and carnations blooming in the 
flower gardens steal gently into your conscious- 
ness. Butterflies wobble, swallows skim, yellow 
birds billow through the air. The meadow lark 
and the bobolink, the quail and the robin fling 
you song wreaths as you pass. Now you grit 
your teeth and clutch your handle bars and 
scream " half-road," as some reckless youngster 
goes sprinting by, and then you plunge into the 
gutter at the peril of your life to give the entire 
path to a young girl, whose cheeks are aflame 
with the glow of health, and think yourself 
more than paid, as the soft tones of her thank 
you," sweeter than bird notes, fall upon your 
ears. 

Clinton, New Hartford, Utica. Nine miles 
in forty minutes (or thirty, if you are an ex- 
pert). Solomon in all his glory, nor Caesar in 
all his power, ever experienced a pleasure like 
that of the bicycle fiend on the cinder path. 

No loaded wagon,' 

Nor ;> copper's " wrath ; 
Stops the " scorcher's " scorch, 

On the cinder path. 

We are behind the times in Cincinnati, and 
will be until we have cinder paths to Hamilton 
and New Richmond. 



226 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXIIL 

T HAVE recently made the acquaintance of a 
gentleman by the name of Mr. Phil. 0. 
Sopher, who literally finds books in brooks, 
sermons in stones, and good in every thing. 

Like the goat, whose powerful digestion en- 
ables it to extract nutriment from every object 
in nature and every article of commerce, no 
incident is too trivial, no fact too stubborn, to 
furnish him food for thought. 

With a bug upon the end of his finger for his 
text, he will read you a lecture fit for the halls 
of a university. He would be a sage in a 
palace, like Marcus Aurelius, or a savant with 
a shackle on his leg, like Epictetus. He can 
sit all day in the shade of a tree listening to the 
song of the birds, or stand calmly in the center 
of the ring on the Stock Exchange, when chaos 
reigns and prices go down like the crash of 
worlds. He is a ripe man, ripened all through, 
and not by a worm at the core ; but by sap and 
sun. Gentle and calm as he is, there are times 
and places where he fires up, being like a fric- 
tion match, which ignites when rubbed over 
rough spots. But whatever befalls him, he 
perpetually seeks the " Sophos " — the wisdom 



THE OPTIMIST. 



227 



that surely lies imbedded in the passing experi- 
ence, thinking, like the bee, that there may be 
honey in every flower, or like the prospector, 
that there may be ore in every hill. 

Sometimes he is profound, sometimes pa- 
thetic, sometimes humorous ; but more often 
simply cheerful. 

He sat upon the bank the other day, while 
the boys were 
wading in the 
Oriskany, such a 
sunny smile play- 
ing over his face 
as was basking 
upon the counte- 
nance of his 
great mother, 
Nature. In fact, 
the resemblance 
between the 
mother and her 
son has often 
been remarked. 

I suppose, said he, that this little river seems 
many miles in width to the little Brownies who 
are paddling through its riffles. And the sum- 
mer afternoon (too short for me), seems like a 
long eternity to them. Experience is our 
measuring rod, and these little men are like a 
surveyor who is trying to get the area of a field 




228 



THE OPTIMIST. 



without a chain. I shall never forget a little 
minnow which I caught upon a bent pin in the 
brook that babbled through my father's farm. 
His nibble felt like the snap of a shark's jaws. 
The sheen upon his silver belly as I whipped 
him out of the water outblazed the light of the 
moon. He looked longer to me than the forty- 
pound muskallonge which I caught last week 
in the St. Lawrence river. I started home on 
a run, with my eyes protruding from my head, 
the fish rod over my shoulder, and the poor 
little minnow dangling in the air, sincerely be. 
lieving that I had caught a whale. 

So many things in life look smaller and less 
desirable now than in childhood that one can 
not help wondering whether the total result of 
life's experience is to find that in proportion as 
we are little and young, all things seem great 
and good, and in proportion as we are big and 
old, all things seem poor and mean. 

When little Billie out there in rush of that 
riffle stands beside the Mississippi, the Amazon 
or the Yukon, they will seem like tiny brooks 
compared with the Oriskany as he sees it now. 

Is his experience symbolical? I say, "no," 
up to this point of life's journey. (Who can 
vouch for his sentiments to-morrow ?) I say, 
"no," because while some horizons shrink 
others expand. While some lines shorten others 
extend. The finite and the temporal may at 



THE OPTIMIST. 



229 



times seem narrow and unsatisfying, but ever- 
more the infinite and eternal widen and deepen 
and lay hold of me with an increasing power. 
As I wade out into the ocean of these great 
thoughts — " What is life ? " " What is it for ? " 
" What is its destiny ? " What is my duty ?" 
" What is the nature of God ? "' — I thrill with a 
wonder such as little Billie can not know, and 
there come moments of rapturous contempla- 
tion of the future, such as dwarf his highest 
ecstasies. 

" That sounds more like religion than phi- 
losophy," said I. " Philosophy is only the 
adolescence of religion," he replied. 



230 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXIV. 



HERE are many statements in the plays 



A of Shakespeare which have all the vir- 
tue of infallibility, without being burdened 
with the proof of a claim to verbal inspiration. 

Every body knows that ' 'the man who hath 
no music in his soul is fit for treason, strata- 
gems, and spoils." 

Possibly he could be pardoned for not loving 
the complex harmonies of Wagner ; but how 
can he hope for mercy if he does not love the 
songs of birds? 

Clinton is a veritable paradise for those 
ethereal beings in whom power, grace, joy, 
and beauty have attained their consummation. 
At 5 o'clock in the morning, the air is all 
a-quiver with their jubilant melodies. 

Phcebes, yellow birds, robins, orioles, pee- 
wees, high-holders, sparrows, thrushes, and 
cat birds are twittering, bubbling, and gur- 
gling in a chorus that lifts the human heart 
out of its sadness and bears it into the calm 
of another world. Below these shriller voices, 
like the sub-bass of an organ, you hear the call 
of the chanticleer, the quack of the goose, and 
the gobble of the turkey. 




THE OPTIMIST. 



231 



I stand on the dewy lawn and look and 
listen as I never looked and listened to 
Thomas' Orchestra in the great Music Hall. 

Yesterday morning a thrush dropped like a 
distilled globule of sunlight out of the heavens, 
lighted upon the topmost bough of a maple 
tree, and, standing like a prima donna in the 
presence of all the crowned heads of the uni- 
verse, lifted up her voice and sang until her 
little body quivered with passion and she 
seemed almost ready to dissolve in the unen- 
durable rapture of life. 

Who can measure the joy which bird songs 
have communicated to human hearts ? I think 
that five per cent of the entire pleasure of many 
lives could be credited to their account. I am 
sure it was so of the former mistress of this 
house. The birds knew her benignant face. 
They almost pecked the crumbs from her 
generous hand. They poured their richest 
melodies into her appreciative ears. It would 
have been more dangerous for a boy to have 
killed a bird in this door-yard than for an in- 
cendiary to have fired the house. Now that 
she is gone, they sit in the tree-tops and fill the 
air with tender plaints. 

Have you ever cast up your own account 
with the birds and tried to measure your obli- 
gations to them ? 

For myself, I have few memories that lie 



232 



THE OPTIMIST. 



beyond the first nest I saw the robins build, 
and the first songs I heard them lift above the 
heads of their young. 

Think of the invalids whose dearest com- 
panion is a canary, from whose palpitating 
throat they hear the only sound that soothes 
the perpetual throb of pain. Think of the sad 
widows, the lonely spinsters, the disappointed 
lovers who turn to a parrot or mocking bird for 
fellowship and sympathy. 

Xo doubt it was a bird which awakened the 
soul of music in the breast of Tubal Cain or 
Orpheus. Whoever the first musician was. he 
was provoked to cut a reed in the swamp and 
make a hollow pipe to imitate the melting lay 
or wild, unearthly trill which he heard warbled 
in a tree-top or flung down from the dome of 
heaven. 

But birds were not only the teachers of 
music. They were also the inspirers of poetry. 
Literature does not contain richer treasures 
than the poems suggested by the ethereal life 
of these inhabitants of the air. The shifting- 
clouds, the rising and setting stars, the brooks, 
the mountains, the gray old ocean, the varie- 
gated flowers, the multitudinous ernotions of 
the soul, the pageantry of life have all con- 
spired to arouse the imagination of poetical 
utterance. But not one of all these mysteries 
has stirred it more deeply than the birds. It 



THE OPTIMIST. 



233 



was the cuckoo that agitated the depths of 
Wordsworth's soul, the thrush the heart of 
Drummond. The bobolink, the swallow, the 
nightingale, the robin, the pelican, the owl, 
the wild duck have, by their songs or cries, 
awakened immortal echoes in the spirits of 
Hewitt, Bryant, Shakespeare, Arnold, Burns, 
and Shelley. 

" Better than all measures 
Of delightful sound; 
Better than all treasures 
That in books are found, 

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the 
ground. 

" Teach me half the gladness 
That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 
From my lips would flow 

The world should listen then as I am listening 
now." 

They have taught us to wonder, to dream, 
to sing, to aspire — and now they are slowly 
teaching Lillienthal to fly ! 



234 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXV. 

a T MUST draw the line somewhere," said 
* the trout, as he felt the fisherman reel- 
ing him in, and started for the cover of an old 
log. 

"I must draw the line somewhere, " said 
Mrs. Partymaker. as she kept thinking of one 
person after another whom she wanted to in- 
vite to her reception, and then counted the 
money which she had saved for the caterer. 

She knew, as every one knows who gives a 
party, that some one will be forgotten, and 
many must be ignored. But what are we to 
do ? Our houses are limited in size, our 
purses are limited in depth, our strength is 
limited in amount. We can not ask every- 
body. We must draw the line somewhere. 

With what boundless confidence we begin 
life! 

Who ever felt its fetters in his youth ? Who 
ever feared its limitations? And who can not 
remember those first bitter experiences when 
he made the discovery that there was some- 
thing which lay beyond his power? 

Every man is bound with a cord which he 
tightens beyond the stretching point, and 



THE OPTIMIST. 



235 



which brings him up at last with a short turn 
whether he will or no. Beyond its limit he 
could not go if he would. 

But there are voluntary as well as necessary 
limitations, and every man must draw the line 
for himself, and say to his soul imperatively 
ten thousand times : " Thus far shalt thou go, 
and no farther." 

When Miss Society Bud came home from 
boarding-school and plunged into the social 
swim, she meant to take in every reception, 
every party, every theater, every concert of 
the season. But one mornino- her aching head 
and pallid cheeks taught her a lesson. She 
took her pen and wrote a half-dozen regrets, 
saying pathetically: "I must draw the line 
somewhere." 

When young Spread Eagle drew his first 
month's wages, he thought they would buy 
every suit of clothes on Fourth street, hire 
any amount of "liveries," and enable him to 
see the "elephants." In a few short days he 
awoke from his dream, rubbed his eyes, looked 
over his account book, and said, with a sigh: 
" I must draw the line somewhere." 

And so must every one — even Sir John Lub- 
bock, who finds time and strength to do a 
great banking business, study the habits of 
ants, and write essays on the philosophy of 
life ; and Gladstone, who can chop down forest 



236 



THE OPTIMIST. 



trees, run a government, write a theological 
treatise, or turn you off an essay on the an- 
cient Greeks with one hand tied behind his 
back. 

There are some men who seem to be un- 
usual geniuses ; but from the depths of their 
eager, yearning hearts, the sad sigh bubbles 
day by day: "I must draw the line some- 
where." 

Yes ; if you wish to do any one thing well, 
you must turn your back upon a thousand 
others. Deny yourself. Restrain yourself. 
Limit yourself. Concentrate yourself. Such 
are the constant whispers of that wise old 
mother, Nature, to her children, as they gird 
themselves for the struggle of life, for she 
wishes them all to win. 

But do not you be frightened by imaginary 
lines 1 They say that if you draw a chalk 
circle around a goose, the silly thing believes 
itself to be surrounded by an impassable 
wall ! 

I know many men and women who might 
range a vast deal farther than they have gone 
among the accomplishments and duties of life, 
but for their timid, silly notion that they were 
shut in by insuperable barriers — which exist 
only in their imaginations. 

"I must draw the line somewhere," whis- 
pered the Angel of Death gently to poor Dob- 



THE OPTIMIST 



237 



son last night, and he looked up pitifully and 
pleaded, "My work is not yet done.'' He 
closed his eyes a moment, a tear stole from 
under the lashes, and the watchers heard him 
murmur, " God knoweth best." 



238 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXVI. 



u^VX THAT'S the matter with your lawn. 

W William?" 
Too many trees." said the old gardener, 
leaning on the •'* spud " with which he was 
patiently digging out the dandelions and the 
plantain. "You can have your choice." he 
continued, "'between shade and grass, but 
you can 't have both, and thereby hangs a 
tale."' 

"What tale?'' said I. pulling a daisy to 
pieces and saying to myself as I dropped the 
petals : 

" Rich man. poor man. beggar man. thief, 
Doctor. lawyer, merchant, chief." 

falling instinctively into a forgotten habit of 
childhood. 

"The tale of all our human life," he an- 
swered; " for we are perpetually forced to 
choose between the horns of dilemmas. We 
are shut up to alternatives. The whole pro- 
cess is one of selection and exclusion. 1 We 
can not have our pudding and eat it, too.' We 
may have the sleep of the laboring man, or 
burn the midnight oil of the scholar. But we 
can not have both the sweet repose of one 




THE OPTIMIST. 



239 



and achieve the brilliant discoveries of the 
other. We can not enjoy the obscure happi- 
ness of private life and the mad excitement 
of public life, the wild pleasure of dissipation 
and the calm peace of righteous living. We 
can not have the shade of a forest and the 
thick greensward, on the same lawn. Sooner 
or later we must make our choice." 

The old man turned back to his work, and, 
picking another daisy, my mind pondered his 
words, while I mechanically repeated he old 
formula : 

" Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. 
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief." 

Right you are, William. It is a life of se- 
lection and exclusion. Xo one man can have 
every thing, and be every thing. The man 
who strives to grasp all will embrace none. 
There is no other right way but to choose with 
deliberation our course of life, concentrate our 
energies upon the attainment of the prizes and 
the pleasures that belong to it, and turn away 
from the rest without a sigh. 

In the mad desire to drain the cup of life, 
to exhaust its pleasures, to compass its entire 
round of joys, multitudes of aspiring natures 
become bewildered, and, striving for every 
thing, lose all, like an old hen who scrabbles 
about the barn-yard, pecking the other fowls 
to keep them from eating her corn, until in 



240 



THE OPTIMIST. 



trying to gobble every kernel, she actually 
seizes none. 

Such men sink into fatal habits of uncer- 
tainty and irresolution. They skip from one 
thing to another, as a bobolink flies along a 
rail fence, fluttering from one stake to the next, 
and never resting upon any. 

Young man, what profession are you go- 
ing to adopt ? 

What business are you going to follow ? 
You have reached an age when every hour of 
indecision counts against you as a deadly loss. 
Choose ! 

What recreation can you legitimately allow 
yourself? Have you time for photography, 
bicycling, gymnastics, music? Which? You 
can not do every thing. Choose ! 

What path of life will you follow ? The 
straight one that leads to life, or the broad 
one that leads to death ? Choose ! 

" How long halt ye between two opinions ?" 
shouted the enraged old prophet to a race of 
people who had sunk into this state of irreso- 
lution. " If the Lord be God, follow him, and 
if Baal be God follow him." 

Nothing is so hard as to make a deliberate 
choice between two pleasing alternatives; 
nothing so fatal as not to ! 

You maybe sure enough that men like Caesar 



THE OPTIMIST. 



241 



and the young Alexander did but little flutter- 
ing. They chose their stake, and lit! 

They did not pull the daisies to pieces as 
I am doing, leaving their destiny to be de- 
cided by some association with a lucky petal. 

Superstitious ? Yes, so they were. But ir- 
resolute ? Never ! 

When they came to their Rubicons or their 
mountain passes, their mighty intellects gripped 
the practical problem, and solved it. Their 
iron wills decided. 

" Veni, Vidi, Vici," I came, I saw, I con- 
quered, said the indomitable Caesar. Go 
you, and see, and conquer. 

" Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, 
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief." 

Throw your daisy down and choose ! 



242 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXVIL 

r I "HE great Pasteur was dining. 

His scrupulous care in washing in a tum- 
bler of water the cherries which he was eating, 
made him the object of a mild ridicule by his 
companions. 

He defended the wisdom of his precautions, 
launched into an argument to prove the exist- 
ence of animalcules which infest the surface 
of all fruits, and solemnly advised his hearers 
never to take a bite of any one of them with- 
out having cleaned it thoroughly in water. 

The argument excited and heated him. He 
suddenly seized the glass in which he had been 
drowning the microbes, and drank the contents 
at a single draught ! 

Two thousand years ago the Divine Master 
warned his disciples against that pharisaical 
zeal which led men to strain out all the little 
gnats in their beverages and then swallow a 
camel — hoofs, hide and hump. 

The idiosyncrasies, the absent-mindedness 
and the hypocrisies of humanity lend a per- 
petual point to the warning, and demand its 
ceaseless repetition. 

One day St. Beauve went out to fight a duel. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



243 



A gentle rain was falling, and as the great critic 
took his place and cocked his pistol, he carefully 
held an am- « ^ 

brella over 
his head. 

His anx-'^^R^^ - 
ious seconds 





remonstrated 
with him for 
an act which 
imperiled his 
life. 

"I am quite willing to be killed," said he, 
" but I can not bear to be wet." 

Some people are very particular about little 
things. 

There is Jack Pott, for example. He is 
punctilious enough about his gambling debts, 
and rolls up his eyes in horror at the very 
thought of not canceling them to the last 
penny; but to my certain knowledge he has 
broken all but one of the Ten Commandments 
without so much as winking an eye. 

It is well known that Mrs. Finicky first boils 
the Ohio river water and then filters it for fear 
of the microbes ; but she also eats lobster salad 
and Welsh rarebit at ten o'clock at night, 
dances sometimes until morning, and laces un- 
til a full respiration is an impossibility. 

I have heard that Queer Stick doles out the 



244 



THE OPTIMIST. 



matches that are used in his princely establish- 
ment, as the steward on a becalmed schooner 
doles out the biscuits to a starving crew, and 
that he spent $10,000 on a wine supper and 
has often been seen lighting his cigars with $20 
bills. 

It is more than a rumor that Deacon Square 
Toes, who has not missed a prayer-meeting for 
twenty years: treats his employes like galley 
slaves, rents his buildings for unmentionable 
uses, and can no more look a subscription 
paper in the face than he could an enraged 
tiger. 

It is not easy to be consistent. In fact, it is 
the harmless inconsistencies of human nature 
that lend a never-ceasing charm to its contem- 
plation. Without them the humorists and 
satirists would have no target for their shafts, 
and half the fun of living would be gone. 

The wisest of men will often, in moments 
of abstraction or vanity, commit the folly of 
Pasteur or St. Beauve, to the infinite delectation 
of their immediate friends or to the students 
of history. 

But for all genuine and downright infractions 
of the law of the Master, let us cherish a gen- 
uine and downright contempt. 

Away with the man who stands in public 
upon all the minutiae of etiquette, and in his 
private life breaks every holy social law. 



THE OPTIMIST. 



245 



Down with the one who haggles for trifles in 
ritual and doctrine, but tramples upon the law 
of liberty and love. 

Men who wash the microbes from their 
cherries and then drink the dirty water, who 
who strain out the little gnats and swallow 
down the camels, who refuse to wet their 
clothes, but who are willing to be shot at — 
bah! 

We have a right to demand of each other a 
consistent life. A public opinion that exalts it 
is just. 



246 



THE OPTIMIST. 



LXVIII. 

A N animated debate was in progress. 

It had wakened the canary, which was 
singing vociferously. The skye-terrier stood 
between the two speakers, wagging his stumpy 
tail, looking anxiously from one to the other, 
and emitting an occasional yelp. 

Tompkins had collected an old debt by due 
process of law. and the question was, "how 
shall it be invested ? " 

He was for depositing it in the savings bank. 

She in a Persian rug. 

'•It will not draw any interest lying on a 
parlor floor," said he, sarcastically. 

" It will excite some,'' she replied. 

" What is money for ? " he asked, snappishly. 

" To buy pretty things,'' she answered. 

" I say it is to live on when you are old, and 
if you had to work for it as hard as I do, you 
would know its value," he retorted. 

"If we always did your way," said she, re- 
lenting a little, "we never would have any 
thing new or nice at all. Every thing would 
be old and shabby, and by and by no one 
would cross our threshold." 

" Let them stay away, then. Old things suit 
me well enough. A thing does n't have to be 
all varnish or luster to give me pleasure. I 



THE OPTIMIST. 



247 



like signs of wear and use. A few cracks and 
stains do not detract from the charm of any 
household goods, any more than a few gray 
hairs and a little incipient wrinkle detract from 
the beauty of woman," he answered, without 
looking up, which, if he had done, the debate 
would have ended, for it was neatly said, and 
Fannie had reached the age where it meant 
some thing. 

' 1 Thank you/' she answered, humbly, " but 
you know that if I err on my side, you do on 
yours. What sort of a home would we have 
had if I had always let you have your own 
way ? I know money is hard to earn, but peo- 
ple must not fossilize. They must have new 
things and pretty things. What were our tastes 
given us for, if not to develop and gratify ? It 
would be as wicked to let the eyes or hands 
atrophy for lack of use, as to let our love of the 
beautiful become extinct." 

" Let it feed on nature and on itself, " he 
said. "I can have just as glorious dreams in 
a bare room with a crust of bread and a pitcher 
of water as I can in an art gallery or a French 
restaurant. The soul may become surfeited as 
well as stimulated by works of art and luxury. 
Look at old Stuffedup. He stands ogling his 
pictures and statues through a lorgnette, and sees 
nothing but dirt and dollars. I see more beauty 
in life every minute than he does in a month." 

" You dear old thing," she said, moving her 



248 



THE OPTIMIST. 



chair and taking his hand. " Of course you 
do. But not every body has your self-inspiring, 
self-sustaining power. Half the time, I think, 
you would get just as much pleasure out of re- 
producing me before that frightful imagination 
of yours as you do out of the flesh and blood 
reality. 

A pantomine followed this remark. The 
conversation became subdued. The canary 
fell asleep. The terrier sank down upon his 
ottoman, the man philosophized. 

' £ My dear girl, I am a conservative and you 
are a radical. I believe in accumulation, and 
you in distribution. I am a Puritan, and you 
are an Aristocrat. I believe in getting the most 
out of what I have, and you believe in getting 
what you have not got. I am the incarnation 
of contentment; you of restless, striving dis- 
contentment." 

' ' These two spirits have always struggled 
together and always must. Civilization is the 
product of both, not one alone. And so is this 
little home of ours — which is far more impor- 
tant. Advancing life is the result of a parallelo- 
gram of forces. Every thing is the effect of a 
compromise." 

66 Yes, dear," she answered, with that smile 
which poor Tompkins felt as frost does sun- 
light, " and we will compromise on the rug." 

He drew a sigh — and a check. 




